What is Text-To-Speech?
Text-To-Speech, or TTS for short, is computer software that converts text into audible speech. You can try it yourself on our demo page. See our Home page for more information. TTS is separate from speech recognition. You can think of TTS as “talking” and speech recognition as “listening”. There is some shared technology, but neither is just the reverse of the other. And the talking/listening analogy is limited too. Neither technology really involves much language understanding. TTS is also distinct from language translation, though voice to voice translation would employ both speech recognition and TTS. Again, translation requires significant understanding of the meaning. People new to the idea of TTS often underestimate the difficulty of the task. After all, humans can typically learn this stuff in early childhood. They talk, listen, understand, and even translate without much apparent effort.
