Machine Learning Is The Latest Stage Of Text To Speech Technology
Machine learning has played a very important role in the development of technology that has a large impact on our everyday lives. However, machine learning is also influencing the direction of technology that is not as commonplace. Text to speech technology is a prime example.
Text to speech technology predates machine learning by over a century. However, machine learning has made the technology more reliable than ever.
We live in an era where audiobooks are gaining more appreciation than the traditional pieces of literature. Thus, it comes as no surprise that the Text-to-Speech (TTS) technology is also rapidly becoming popular. It caters to those who need it most, including children who struggle with reading, and those who suffer from a disability. Big data is very useful in assisting these people.
There are other elements of speech synthetization technology that rely on machine learning. It is now so sophisticated that it can even mimic someone else’s voice.
Text to Speech (commonly known as TTS) is a piece of assistive technology (that is, any piece of technology that helps individuals overcome their challenges) that reads text out loud, and is available on almost every gadget we have on our hands today. It has taken years for the technology to develop to the point it is at today. Machine learning is changing the direction of this radical technology. However, its journey is one that started in the late eighteenth century.
TTS is a complicated technology that has developed over a long period of time. It all began with the construction of acoustic resonators, which could only produce just the sounds of the vowels. These acoustics were developed in 1779, due to the dedicated work of Christian Kratzenstein. With the advent of semiconductor technology and improvements in signal processing, computer-based TTS devices started hitting the shelves in the 20th century. There was a lot of fascination surrounding the technology during its infancy. This was primarily why Bell Labs’ Vocoder demonstration found its way into the climactic scene of one of the greatest sci-fi flicks of all time – 2001: A Space Odyssey.
A couple of years ago, Medium contributor Utkarsh Saxena penned a great article on speech synthesis technology with machine learning. They talked about two very important machine learning approaches: Parametric TTS and Concatenative TTS. They both help with the development of new speech synthesizing techniques.
At the heart of it, a TTS engine has a front-end and a back-end component. Modern TTS engines are heavily dependent on machine learning algorithms. The front-end deals with converting the text to phonetics and meaningful sentences.
