It’s no secret that text to voice has been revolutionary for all kinds of people. If you or someone you know has difficulty seeing or problems with reading, you might even have used some of this technology before. What most people don’t know is how this technology actually works.
How do the words on a web page or document get translated to the actual dialogue we can hear with our very own ears? How does it happen so fast and does it really work with everything you could possibly type? The answers to those questions might surprise you.
What Does Speech Synthesis Do
Text to speech is created using a process called speech synthesis. This is where the text is transcribed, translated, and relayed into another form, in this case, as sound. It works by first analyzing a word or sentence. For example, the sentence “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” is written on a page, and then studied by the software to break apart the letters, context, and usage to assign the proper audio.
Each individual letter and word has its own audio byte attached, and once the letters are analyzed, these sound bytes can be strung together to make the complete sentence we hear. In the above example, the word “fox” contains the letters “F”, “O”, and “X”, which are first read by the software individually, then put back together as “fox”. Since “fox” is a common word, it’s likely already in the database of learned words which allows for proper pronunciation and context.
How It’s Evolving
Thanks to an ever-growing database of words, a language can be easier understood providing more accuracy for words and sentences to deliver sentences with the context. For example, the sentence “I didn’t say he stole the money” can have a different meaning entirely based on which word is emphasized, which can be understood only with context. For example, emphasizing “he” implies that someone else stole the money, or emphasizing “money” implies that something else besides money was stolen.
It’s a good speech synthesizer’s job to analyze the context and deliver the interpretation that best fits the situation depending on what the context is. That’s where the text to voice generator really shine because they are getting better at analysis and learning to deliver the proper methods of delivery. It doesn’t matter what words you put in or even what language they are in. These services have learned from countless already inputted words and are able to provide accurate results that will only get better as time goes on.
The future of text to voice is only looking brighter. These services will continue to evolve and deliver smoother dialogue as the technology progresses and more words, contexts, and sentences are analyzed. There’s no reason to doubt that soon we will be at the point where these text to voice generators can deliver fully accurate results for any given text with instant results, no matter how different the sentences might be even if the words used are exactly the same.
