Text to speech (TTS) is a technology that converts text into spoken audio. It can read aloud PDFs, websites, and books using natural AI voices. Text-to-speech (TTS) technology can be helpful for anyone who needs to access written content in an auditory format, and it can provide a more inclusive and accessible way of communication for many people.

In this article, we will explain how text to speech voices work and why you need them for your devices and applications.

Text to speech voices work by using a speech synthesizing technique in which the text is at first converted into its phonetic form. The phonetic form is a representation of how the text sounds when spoken. For example, the word “cat” has the phonetic form /kæt/.

The next step is to match the phonetic form with the corresponding human audio. This can be done by using a database of pre-recorded human voices for each phonetic sound, or by using a neural network that can generate realistic speech from scratch. The latter method is based on DeepMind’s speech synthesis expertise, and it can produce voices that are near human quality.

The final step is to apply some adjustments to the speech output, such as pitch, rate, and intonation. These adjustments can make the speech sound more natural and expressive, and they can also be customized according to the user’s preference or the application’s context.

Text to speech voices can offer many benefits for your devices and applications, such as:

• Improving customer interactions with intelligent, lifelike responses. You can use text to speech voices to create voice user interfaces that can engage your users with natural and conversational speech. You can also personalize your communication based on user preference of voice and language.
• Creating a unique voice for your brand across all your customer touchpoints. You can use text to speech voices to train a custom voice model using your own audio recordings, or to choose from a set of 380+ voices across 50+ languages and variants. This way, you can create a distinctive and consistent voice identity for your organization.
• Enhancing accessibility and inclusion for your content. You can use text to speech voices to make your content more accessible for people who have difficulty reading or who prefer listening over reading. You can also use text to speech voices to support multilingual users and reach a wider audience.

Text to speech voices are a powerful technology that can transform text into spoken audio using natural AI voices. They can help you improve your customer interactions, create a unique voice for your brand, and enhance accessibility and inclusion for your content. If you want to try text to speech voices for yourself, you can use online tools like NaturalReaders or Google Cloud Text-to-Speech API to convert any text into speech with just a few clicks.