Text-to-speech

What is text-to-speech?

Text-to-speech is the opposite concept to speech-to-text. It describes software and technologies that allow translating the written text into spoken language. It produces an artificial human speech that reads a particular text. 

Why is it important?

Text-to-speech technology is crucial for people that have difficulties with reading: low literacy, reduced vision, learning disabilities. It allows to provide them with the necessary information without them physically reading it. Text-to-speech technology is also used in numerous applications: robots, virtual assistants, chatbots. You may have seen text-to-speech technology in action in Google Translate (accessed by clicking on the button showed below)

Google Translate can synthesize artificial speech to read the text