Art and Business of Speech Recognition: Creating the Noble Voice, The

Prompt Creation—Text-to-Speech and Recorded Voices

There are two ways to create audio prompts. One method is to record a real person, called a voice talent, saying phrases, while the other is to use text-to-speech (TTS) software that converts text stored in a digital form (for example, an e-mail message) to a spoken utterance, in real time. TTS is generally used to read dynamic information in a cost-effective manner that otherwise would be difficult or impossible to prerecord, for example, the daily news or the weather. There are two types of popular TTS engines—those that synthesize the sound, formant TTS, and those that take thousands of small pieces of prerecorded human-speech and concatenate them, or string them, together, called concatenative ...