Speech Synthesis: Toward a “Voice” for All

Abstract

Text to speech (TTS) has become so much a part of our everyday lives thanks to Alexa, Google, Siri, and many others that we have come to know (if not always love) that it is difficult to recall a time when it was not so. Synthetic voices like those for Siri and others fill multiple roles today. They deliver announcements of important information over public address systems in noisy places like airports where high intelligibility of the speech in noise is crucial to ensure the information they carry is heard correctly. A synthetic voice may be the first entity a customer interacts with when contacting a company and it is important for the voice, as a representative of the company, to present a natural and pleasing voice quality that is representative of the company’s image. Synthetic voices serve as the only voice for individuals whose own voice is lost due to injury or a progressive neurological disease like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS; also called Lou Gehrig’s disease or motor neuron disease [MND]) or who have a congenital dysarthria due to a condition such as cerebral palsy. And TTS voices allow blind or nonliterate users to read content from news stories, books, and computer screens while giving busy people an opportunity to “read” email even when driving their car.