I'm trying to route the output of Google Translate (https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/quickstart-client-libraries) to Plivo's (https://www.plivo.com/) text to speech engine using XML (https://api-reference.plivo.com/latest/php/plivo-xml/overview). The output of some translations include special characters associated with different languages. For instance one translation contains : "Siamo aperti dal luned\u00ec al venerd\u00ec". According to Plivo all special characters are to be converted into their decimal equivilent. I quote "convert Unicode characters into numeric expression" (https://support.plivo.com/support/solutions/articles/17000050188-what-are-the-languages-supported-for-tts-text-to-speech-).
For some reason this just is not sinking in as to what exactly I'm supposed to do to make this conversion or for that matter even detect what characters I should decode and which I should not. Plivo even seems to choke on the ~ that is part of some spanish characters.
I thought about just piping the output of Google Translate into Google Text to Speech and saving the sound file but Google choices of voices is limited compared to Plivo.
What I'm trying to accomplish is : Process Translate Request through Google Translate Store to a MySQL Table (FYI Character set utf8mb4) Retrieve translation from Table *Convert special characters as needed (there's where I'm stuck) Send to Plivo's text to speech.
Please note, this is Plivo's text to speech for telephony. Their SMS Feature seems to handle these conversions natively.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
TIA
