Google’s text-to-speech engine is updating its voices

The speech engine Speech Services by Google is being upgraded to enhance readability and make text-to-speech voices in Android apps sound extra pure. You can hear the distinction between the outdated voices and the up to date voices for your self by prerecorded snippets on the Android Developers Blog.

Frankly, whereas the voices do sound clearer, I’m skeptical in regards to the claims it sounds extra pure. It’s additionally nonetheless troublesome to establish what the primary sentence in these US English-language recordings really says — is that this my gun? Is this my god? Apparently, it says, “is this mic on?” however that was misplaced on me.

All 421 voices in 67 languages throughout the system are getting a brand new voice mannequin and synthesizer. The present default voice in “English-US” is altering to at least one constructed utilizing “fresher speaker data,” which, alongside different updates, ends in a recognizable enchancment from the earlier default voice. You may hearken to how the up to date voices sound in languages corresponding to “Spanish-US” and “Brazilian-Portuguese.”

The replace announcement says that folk already utilizing text-to-speech tech don’t have to do something to obtain the brand new voices, as “everything will happen behind the scenes” with the updates being downloaded robotically. Its listing on the Google Play Store states that the service is already utilized by quite a lot of native purposes corresponding to Google Maps, Google Translate, and the Android Recorder app, so likelihood is that in case you use an Android machine, you most likely already use the Speech Services by Google speech engine even in case you don’t comprehend it. The replace is rolling out over the following few weeks to all 64-bit Android gadgets by way of the Google Play Store.