Text-to-Speech
Also called TTS, Speech synthesis, AI voice generator, Voice cloning
AI that turns written text into natural-sounding spoken audio, in a choice of voices, languages and styles.
What is text-to-speech?
Text-to-speech (TTS) is generative AI that reads text aloud in a human-sounding voice. It's used for voice-overs, audiobooks, accessibility, phone systems, language learning and the "speaking" half of voice assistants.
How does it work?
A model reads the text, predicts how it should sound (pronunciation, rhythm, emphasis and tone), and generates the audio. Modern models are trained on many hours of recorded speech and can sound very close to a real person. Many let you choose a voice, adjust speed and emotion, or switch language.
Voice cloning is a related feature: from a short recording of someone's voice, the model learns to speak new text in that voice.
What is it commonly confused with?
- Speech-to-text. That's the opposite direction, from audio to text.
- Old screen readers. Older systems stitched together recorded sounds and sounded robotic. AI voices sound natural enough that listeners often can't tell.
Why does it matter?
Natural AI voices make audio content cheap and fast to produce in many languages. The same quality creates risk: cloned voices are used in scams and deepfakes. Only clone a voice with the speaker's clear permission, check the tool's commercial-use terms, and tell listeners when a voice is AI-generated where that matters. Some providers add watermarks to generated audio.
