Text to Speech: Find the Perfect Voice for Your Text

Text to Speech: Find the Perfect Voice for Your Welcome Message and Menu Options

Nowadays, multiple artificial intelligence platforms are making headlines: ChatGPT, Microsoft, Google, and Apple are all competing to have the smartest platform. From our telephony background, we are particularly interested in how these platforms process text to speech. In the past, computer-generated speech sounded very robotic, making it unsuitable for professional welcome messages.

With new text to speech technology, it’s almost impossible to tell the difference between real and artificial voices. This is ideal for your welcome messages, voicemail, or menu options!

Especially if you need to frequently update messages or respond quickly to incidents like outages, this allows you to provide callers with up-to-date information without needing a colleague with a good phone voice to record a new message. Imagine typing a text and, with just one click, bringing it to life. Artificial intelligence converts text into natural-sounding speech, enabling you to listen to everything from books to news articles.

Behind the Scenes at TTS

Behind the scenes of a text to speech service, a complex process analyzes text and converts it into audio recordings. This magic happens in two steps: first, the text is analyzed to understand its meaning, then it is read aloud by a synthesized voice. Thanks to advancements in AI, we can now listen to artificial speech that is almost indistinguishable from a real human voice! Text to speech is more than just a handy tool; it makes information and entertainment more accessible for everyone. People with visual impairments, reading difficulties, or those learning a new language benefit greatly from this technology. Everything can now be spoken and thus heard! TTS is also used in the entertainment industry to create lifelike voices for animations, video games, and dynamic voice-overs in advertisements. And now, Belfabriek offers free text to speech for all your welcome messages, menu options, and voicemails! Choosing the Right Text to Speech Platform for Belfabriek

We have tested all the major platforms and made multiple integrations so we can easily switch the underlying TTS platform when converting text to speech. Google’s TTS has more voices, while Microsoft’s TTS is slightly better at the time of writing (June 2024). We let these platforms generate the speech, then convert the TTS file to the best format for telephony (uLaw) and create a mono recording because phones do not use stereo. As you can see, a lot of programming work goes into our text to speech assistant, but automating it saves everyone a lot of steps in converting text to speech!

How to Easily Use Our Text to Speech Assistant

Text to Speech Step-by-Step Instructions:

1. Go to the online text to speech assistant.

2. Type the text you want to be spoken.

3. Select the voice you want it to be spoken in.

4. Press play to generate the speech.

5. Press play again to listen to the generated speech. You will see a code of 5 letters. Note this code so you can easily paste it into your portal for voicemail, welcome messages, or menu options. You can see how easy it has become. The best part is that this text to speech service is included for free with your phone number, so you don’t have to pay anything extra. No need to hire a voice-over artist for audio recordings! Important with TTS:

6. The adventure begins with your text. Make sure it is carefully written and free from errors, as any typo can affect the TTS output. Unnecessary formatting is also redundant; the TTS engine needs clean, unformatted text to produce the best results.

7. You can insert pauses by adding a space. This is often useful when pronouncing phone numbers; for example, you may want to add a space between the area code.

We wish you lots of fun and success using our text to speech assistant for creating your menu options, welcome messages, and voicemails!