One of the technologies that have improved significantly in the last 2-3 years is Speech Synthesis technology, which is the process of generating spoken language by machine on the basis of written input.

Thanks to Machine Learning and the openwork by DeepMind – a Google company, Synthetic voices are now capable of mimicking almost all the characteristics of a human voice so much so that they are almost indistinguishable.

Amazon is one of the leading providers of Text to Speech technology with their Polly offering. They call it “Lifelike speech”, and they sure are making a great effort to keep up to it.

Their latest update is the one called “conversational voice” – which simulates the speech patterns of a friendly conversation. We think this is the best voice in the market so far because it sounds shockingly natural!

It produces utterances and nuances that not only make the voice sound friendly and pleasing but also extremely realistic and pleasant to listen to.

It also adapts its speaking style to match the context of the text and provides clarity and expression that inspires trust and is easy to understand.

It’s the voice that allows you to connect with your audience in a friendly and cheerful way.

Some of the characteristics that make this voice sound so natural are:

Depth in the voice: There is a certain texture in the voice that makes it sound like its being spoken from the throat – like a slightly coarse texture, and this makes it sound just like a human voice. Dynamic and natural intonation: Although most of the “neural” voices today have great intonation, this voice is on par with producing the right intonation, in the right context at the right time. Expressive and engaging: The voice perfectly conveys the expression from the text and has the power to instill an emotion in the listener’s mind.

We played around with this voice and created a few samples for you to hear. You too can create audio from our online Text-to-Voice Editor.

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Historically, synthetic voices have followed a concatenative approach to generating speech which resulted in a poor quality that sounded monotonous and robotic. Due to this, the applications of this technology were limited to only specific use cases mostly around accessibility purposes

The modern Synthetic voices are nothing like the old ones. Their realistic characteristics are opening up a world of new applications:

Some of the use cases we see from our users are:

Creating audio for product demos, presentations, etc. Creating podcasts Converting articles and blog posts into audio Audiobooks Voice over for Youtube and other videos Creating eLearning material for education and courses.

We would love to learn your use case. Now that you have the best synthetic voice at your disposal, what will you create?