We have all seen or used text to speech voices at some point. The convenience of having long documents read to us, and having something that helps people with poor eyesight is a great innovation that many consider indispensable. With these services taking off and improving greatly, the process by which voices are actually generated from online text is finding surprising advancements.
How Does it Happen
The basics of how it works are that a process called speech synthesis is applied to text detected by the software. Human speech is artificially produced and relayed based on voice clips that are stored in a database. Alternatively, speech could be computer generated entirely through digitized sounds. There are two phases that let text to speech happen. First, the software will convert raw letters, symbols, and numbers into strings of written-out words. Vocal clips are assigned to each word so that everything will have a corresponding voice clip. Next. these individual clips are synthesized into phonetic sounds and relayed back to the user. In essence, that basically means that the software is reading the words for you and speaking them out to you.
To achieve both a natural sounding voice and speed of accurate transcriptions, one method used is called concatenative synthesis, where the analysis of the online text is used to string together samples of prerecorded speech. This has the advantage of producing a very realistic sound as it was recorded by a living person. Algorithms are utilized to select each segment of the sound and begin the process of relaying back.
In addition to this, another method utilized in creating voice is utilizing entirely computer-generated sound. Typically, these sounds are much more robotic and unnatural sounding but come with many advantages such as high-speed processing. These sounds can be generated at a much quicker pace and avoid errors that sometimes come about when utilizing naturalized sounds.
For example, a text to speech service that utilizes natural sounding voices would be an educational platform for students to help assist in reading skills. A computer-generated voice, on the other hand, is used more for accessibility options on a PC
Each of these solutions has its own pros and cons, but many providers of text to speech generator software are seeking to improve upon them and provide services that feature realistic and human-sounding voices with the speed and accuracy of computer-synthesized sounds. As more industries see the value of incorporating text to speech systems, more is being invested into ensuring they meet their full potential. It’s estimated that by 2025, revenue in the voice and speech recognition market will reach up to $25 Billion. As a growing population of people comes to rely more on the internet as they grow older, these software services will become necessary parts of day to day life as the ability to reliably browse information online will decrease as people age. This has been recognized by many industries as text to speech services have boomed in popularity.