8Interactive

How writing style effects Text to Speech (TTS) synthesis

We use TTS (text to speech) in our FeedMe platform so that our app can read your content to you while you walk Fido, commute to work, or cook dinner. It’s a great time saver because you can keep up with important information while doing other activities.

For many publishers there is simply too much content to do recording sessions with professional voice actors. Furthermore, the delay in the professional recording process would detract from timely delivery.

Our TTS synthesis engine is quite natural sounding, and pleasant to listen to.

But there are challenges with TTS. Articles written for mainstream news publications by professional journalists work quite well with TTS. But with our FeedMe Tech application, we find that there are occasions when the complexity of the writing in the technology blogs can sometimes lead to undesirable results. When you look at the underlying content, it’s easy to see why - it can actually be hard to read it out loud yourself.

Another challenge with TTS is the vocabulary. One of the services that we provide publishers is creating a custom voice. Suppose for example that your brand would be best represented with a Robin Williams voice reading your publication to your subscribers. We can create that voice for you (with Robin William’s help, of course). Creating voices is a very technical and time consuming process. At the risk of over-simplifying, one of the components of a voice is a dictionary that maps words or phrases to audio snippets. A nice side-effect is that when creating a voice for a particular domain, such as reading medical articles, the ‘dictionary’ can include the necessary medical terms. Or, as in the case of technology, it could include the words that aren’t really words and other jargon that we tend to use in the technology world.

This is a small snapshop of the power of text to speech and how it can transform your message, we will be talking more about the benefits of text to speech in the next blog post. Happy holidays everyone!