At Spokestack, we process a lot of, well, speech. Our libraries help you both listen to and talk to your users. Both parts are tricky, requiring sophisticated machine learning models and lots of data. On the text-to-speech side, we’re constantly working to improve our models to give our voices higher fidelity and smoother prosody, and do it all even faster.

It’s easy to focus on that sort of improvement exclusively and forget that there’s more to reading text than a left-to-right (or right-to-left) translation of characters into sounds. I recently posted on Medium about some of the edge cases we’ve encountered while building our system. There are quite a few ways to trip over yourself, so if you’re interested in responding to your users naturally — with a voice unique to your brand — get in touch!

Originally posted May 27, 2020