How does text-to-speech work?Īs you might imagine, teaching a machine to speak is no easy task. In some cases, the smooth tones of machine voices can be nearly indistinguishable from our own. Today, TTS serves all kinds of purposes, and synthetic voices have grown impressively accurate thanks to advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Standard computer operating systems have included speech synthesizers since the early ’90s, mainly for dictation and transcription. One of the first speech synthesis integrated circuits was the Votrax chip, which made computer-generated sounds to mimic the human voice and was used in arcade games like “Gorf” and “Wizard Of Wor.” In 1980, Texas Instruments made a splash with its Speak N Spell synthesizer, which was used as an electronic reading aid for children.
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That same year, an IBM's 7094 mainframe computer sang the folk song “Daisy Bell,” inspiring a climactic scene in Kubrick’s 2001 (the movie is truly an example of life imitating art and art imitating life.)īut it wasn't until the ’70s and ’80s, with the arrival of integrated circuits, that commercial speech synthesis products finally emerged in telecommunications and, notably, video games. In the late 1950s, the first computer-based speech synthesis systems were developed, and in 1961 Bell Laboratories again made history when physicist John Larry Kelly Jr. Over the next few decades, researchers built on the Voder.
“Good afternoon, radio audience,” it uttered before marveled spectators, sounding more alien than human, yet remarkably intelligible. The enormous organ-like apparatus required a human operator to manipulate its keys and foot pedal. and are often designed as subservient female characters, they do sound quite lifelike and they tell a pretty good joke or two.Īt the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City, Homer Dudley of Bell Laboratories demonstrated the world’s first functional voice synthesizer: the Voder. While these assistants occasionally slip up - accidentally ordering $200 worth of laundry detergent, playing lullabies instead of news podcasts, etc. Intelligent audio assistants like Siri and Alexa are great for multitasking, allowing you to order pizza or hear the weather report while you’re engaged in other physical tasks (e.g. No matter where you’re going, most GPS apps can deliver helpful voice alerts as you travel, some in multiple languages.
You can’t look at a map while you drive, but you can listen to instructions.
TikTok’s Text-to-Speech synthesizer, for example, is a widely used accessibility feature, allowing anyone to consume visual social media content. If you’re visually impaired or handicapped, you might use TTS for reading text content or use a screen reader to speak aloud words. Helped along by apps, smart speakers, and wireless headphones, speech synthesis makes life easier by improving: You probably come across all kinds of synthetic speech throughout a typical day. Speech synthesizers take written words and turn them into spoken language. Speech synthesis - also called text-to-speech, or TTS - is an artificial simulation of the human voice by computers.
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