Next-generation text-to-speech: Helping enhance technological performance and accuracy

Technology is at the epicentre of all global business activities today. With a preference for digitization, tele-support and intelligent machines, the ‘Text-to-Speech’ or speech recognition platforms have emerged as one of the most promising tools of the day. At times confused with the voice recognition tools, the technology focuses on converting spoken words into text, finding the right responses, and turning them from text to speech. In advanced systems, these processes are carried out in near real-time and often make the users feel that they are talking to a human being and not a machine.

Today, such advanced text-to-speech solutions are being increasingly used all over the world. From smart-home systems and in-phone assistants to in-vehicle systems, the computer-generated voice is finding resonance in various scenarios. Businesses and even government organizations are using such platforms to handle customer calls, undertake sales and marketing activities, and even engage audiences.

At the users’ end, the technology is almost intuitive, invisible, and efficient, but there are incredible complexities involved at the backend. To begin with, human languages and speech are extremely diverse. Each word in each language has its meaning, but more often than not, it is the context of spoken words that conveys the actual meaning of the communication. This is an area where even the most advanced speech technology-driven computers have struggled in the past.

Right from the early days of computers, scientists have been pursuing the goal of generating human-like machine voices. Almost everyone in the technology community fondly recalls how the late iconic scientist Stephen Hawking used a version of text-to-speech technology to communicate with others by using a keyboard. Even though the voice was artificial sounding, it did give intelligible responses and enabled Hawking to communicate with his listeners.

In recent years, the developments in the field of these technologies have been nothing short of revolutionary. New ground is being broken wherein computers now cannot only sound like natural human voices but also deliver intelligible responses to even complex queries. A quantum leap in this arena has been the integration of Natural Language Processing (NLP) into voice tools. Today’s software is capable of not only understanding the meaning of the words being said but also predicting the sentiment and the intent of the speakers. Whether someone is sad, happy, keen to buy a product, or annoyed, all these deductions can be made by the computers based on the tone, pitch, vocabulary, and voice energy of the speakers. Accordingly, computers can respond in a human-like manner.

By further bringing AI and data analytics into the mixture, today’s text-to-speech solutions are being refined to overcome a fundamental need of the last generation solutions. Even though the earlier systems could sound like humans, and respond intelligibly, they had to rely on training with recordings of real speech. That results in good quality output, but limitations of scope.

This is where the ability to create synthetic speech has now enabled computers to learn speech style modifications based on a few hours of training data. What this implies is that the computers can now understand the context in near real-time and say the same sentences or words in different ways to convey a variety of meanings. The idea is to offer text-to-speech platforms that are sensitive to the person they are communicating with, and the environment and shape the response accordingly.

The ability to understand the context, sentiment and intent of the users has tremendous potential benefits in areas such as customer service, sales and marketing, online education, smart-home tools, digital personal assistants and digital readers, etc. All these machines are being made more accurate and responsive courtesy of the text-to-speech developments. People are being given better experiences and businesses can generate superior ROIs from such AI-powered TTS solutions globally.

These are highly exciting developments for all stakeholders. With IoT-driven automation connecting a much larger diversity of devices than ever, the day is not far when accurate and responsive zero-UI gadgets, equipment, and appliances are going to become the norm!

The article has been written by Saikat Chakrabarty, Senior Manager - Engineering, Mihup