When it comes to answering questions, promoting a product, marketing a service, or closing a sale, the sound of the human voice is a powerful element. Voice can be more engaging and persuasive than text, and it can reach a wider audience, including people who are visually impaired or who prefer to listen to content rather than read it. Text-to-speech (TTS), also referred to as text-to-voice, is a digital technology that can be used to create audio versions of written materials such as product descriptions and sales pitches; this can help to reach a wider audience, engage with your target audience, and save money on marketing costs.
How TTS Works
TTS solutions convert text into human-like speech. This technology is used in a variety of applications, such as virtual assistants and GPS navigation systems. TTS works by breaking the digital text down into phonemes, which are the smallest units of sound in a language, and which are then converted into the sound waves we understand as the human voice. MacSpeech for the Apple Macintosh was the first TTS software developed for a personal computing platform in 1985; since then, TTS has become sophisticated to the point of generating voices that are becoming increasingly natural-sounding thanks to the wonders of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). This means that TTS is becoming a more viable option for commercial use.
Virtual assistants such as Apple Siri and Amazon Alexa use advanced TTS to convert text into spoken words. In the MacSpeech days, TTS technology sounded robotic because the phonetic analysis was rigid and limited. These days, when you tell apps such as Google Assistant to read an email message, the AI scans all words before assigning adequate pitch, loudness, and duration. The words are then played back in sequence, creating an illusion of human speech, or at least a very close approximation known as natural language processing (NLP).
TTS Applications for Business
The business sector has been using TTS since before MacSpeech. In 1982, the United States Department of Defense launched an Automated Voice Response System that worked over analog telephone lines; this project was developed to deliver information on demand to military personnel. A few years later, the U.S. Postal Service and the American Foundation for the Blind adopted TTS for various internal projects.
TTS development and adoption reached new heights in the 1990s, with several companies using it for automated customer service systems that can answer questions and resolve issues without the need for human intervention. This form of adoption evolved into making information and content more accessible to people with disabilities, particularly those who are blind or have low vision. In this fashion, TTS can help to ensure that everyone has equal access to information and opportunities.
If you’re looking for a way to improve your marketing campaigns, TTS technology is a tool that you can certainly consider because it can help you to reach a wider audience, engage with your target audience, and save money on marketing costs. Automated voice-calling campaigns are good examples of clever TTS adoption for promotional purposes. Regardless of the business processes you assign to TTS, implementation these days can be more efficiently achieved with the right text to voice API solution.
Choosing a TTS API Solution for Your Business
The application programming interface (API) of a TTS engine allows you to build, send, and manage automated calling campaigns on a large scale. While digital TTS conversion into NLP voices that sound human and pleasant are at the heart of API functionality, you should also be able to take advantage of other benefits such as:
- Tandem management of bulk SMS and phone campaigns.
- Multiple language support.
- Broadcasting to mobile and landline devices.
- Sophisticated interactive voice response systems.
- Quality monitoring.
- Answering machine detection.
Modern text-to-voice API solutions grant easy web access so that you can use your favorite coding platform, language, or framework. As long as your code supports Representational State Transfer (REST) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) to access web services. When properly implemented, TTS technology can make business processes more dynamic, versatile, intuitive, and convenient. Don’t forget that TTS can also help with the implementation of website accessibility tools.
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