Typical TTS Scenario

Voice Assistant

Many enterprise wants to build their own voice assistant. Typically the TTS in such scenario speaks short utterances in the human-bot interactions. A few key design consideration in this scenario:

• minimize dialog latency. it is good to use direct line speech which can hook up the bot service and TTS/SR service in closest region
• use an off-the-shelf voice. The neural voice are recommended for its high quality and personality fit.
• use a branded voice. Custom neural voice is recommended to create a branded voice with a few hundreds recordings.

Immersive Reading

Application can use TTS to read long content like an email, news article or one chapter of a book. In such scenario, the content is usually long. So it is desired to have a way to play the response while TTS is still rendering. There are two options:

• Speech SDK supports streaming output of the responses. The application developers can develop the streaming rendering logic on the client for the audio stream.
• Use immersive reading SDK which uses Azure TTS underline.

Audio Content Generation

TTS can be used to turn a long article or even book into audio files. To do it, one can try below method.

• How to synthesize a large file into audio files

Connected Car

In car scenario, normally TTS still needs to work when disconnected. So it is desired to have a hybrid design.

There could be different skills in car scenario

• If it is an online skill like weather, recommend to call TTS, compress the audio with silk/ogg/mp3 and send to the car head unit to render
• If it is an on device skills like opening the window, use below policy

1. use online TTS when there is connection.
2. fallback to a device voice in the same voice talent when disconnected.

We offer hybrid solution for connected car scenario

Accessibility

Windows 10 OS provides more than 40+ locales TTS for accessibility scenario. It can be invoked using WinRT Speech API