Text to Speech (TTS)

Text to speech (TTS) is the process by which text can be converted into its spoken equivalent by a synthesized voice. This generally happens by employing software applications or web services. The result of this process can be heard via any sound card (las it happens with screen readers), or recorded to audio files for later consumption.

Text to speech is used across a very wide range of applications: from voice assistants to GPS applications, through PBX systems, conference servers, and whatever scenario may require adding speech to different types of content.

With regards to accessibility, TTS plays a critical role: it powers certain assistive technologies (screen readers, reading AIDS, etc.), but it can also be used to improve the accessibility of different types of content (media and gaming apps, videos, etc.) by authors, designers and developers.

Resources

Showing results 1 to 12, out of 15.

Pico TTS

Vincenzo Rubano
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Initially developed by SVox (a Swiss company acquired in 2011 by Nuance), Pico TTS is a multilingual, open source speech synthesizer that can run many operating systems including Windows, Linux, Mac OS, and Android.

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Using The Web Speech Api

Vincenzo Rubano
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In this guide you can learn how to leverage the Web Speech API in order to perform speech synthesis (Text to Speech, TTS) and speech recognition within a browser.

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Web Speech Api

Vincenzo Rubano
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The so called “Web Speech API” is a set of APIs that allow you to integrate support for speech in your websites or applications. It is made of by two main parts:

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Voice Dream Reader

Vincenzo Rubano
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Voice Dream Reader is an award-winning, feature rich commercial text-to-speech reader that turns any document and ebook into audio. It provides a comprehensive set of features that make reading documents (including books and web pages) on iOS an extremely pleasant experience.

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Biblos

Vincenzo Rubano
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Developed by Giuseppe Di Grande (an Italian blind programmer), Biblos is a free, accessible word processor that provides many features that make it suitable for usage both by people with disabilities and the production of accessible content for people with disabilities.

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Mozilla TTS

Vincenzo Rubano
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Being developed under the umbrella of the Mozilla Foundation (the same foundation who develops the Firefox browser and Thunderbird mail client), Mozilla TTS is an open source framework whose goal is to simplify the creation of Text to Speech (TTS) voices based on artificial intelligence (AI) techniques.

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Text to Speech - IBM Watson

Vincenzo Rubano
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Quoting its official web page, “IBM Watson Text to Speech is an API cloud service that enables you to convert written text into natural-sounding audio in a variety of languages and voices”.

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Balabolka

Vincenzo Rubano
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Balabolka is a Text-To-Speech (TTS) program that boasts many features to make life easier when reading text on a screen. It can read content from the clipboard, extract text from documents in many different formats, display the spoken text with customize font and background color, and control reading from the system tray or by global keyboard shortcuts.

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Azure TTS

Vincenzo Rubano
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Quoting its presentation page, Azure TTS is “a Speech service feature that converts text to lifelike speech”. Being offered as a cloud service by Microsoft, it supports over 330 voices in more than 129 languages, providing voice variants with different styles and emotional tones to make them suitable for different usage scenarios (text readers, support chatbots, ETC.

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Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML)

Vincenzo Rubano
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Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) is a W3C recommendation designed to provide a rich, XML-based markup language for assisting the generation of synthetic speech in Web and other applications.

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Espeak NG

Vincenzo Rubano
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Espeak is a lightweight, open source speech synthesizer that is available for many operating systems including Windows, Linux, Mac OS, and Android. It supports more than 100 languages and accents.

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Google Cloud Tts

Vincenzo Rubano
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Quoting Google, Google Cloud Text to Speech (TTS) is a cloud service that allows you to “convert text into natural-sounding speech using an API powered by Google’s AI technologies”.

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