Microsoft Azure Text to Speech service now offers natural-sounding voice and emotion styles

Microsoft Cognitive Services’ Text to Speech service converts text to speech for more natural interfaces. Developers can make use of this service to build apps and services that speak naturally. Thanks to breakthrough research in speech synthesis technology, Microsoft’s Text to Speech service already delivers fluid, natural-sounding speech that matches the stress patterns and intonation of human voices. Today, Microsoft announced three new voice styles and emotion styles offering developers more choice in selecting the speech style for their applications.

Microsoft is announcing the following three voice styles:

• Newscast – With neural TTS voices in the newscast style, your users can enjoy listening to news or articles in a professional tone that reflects what you might hear on TV or radio newscasts.
• Customer service – The customer service style features a friendly and engaging tone and is suitable for scenarios involving customer support, such as an individual checking into their flight, making a restaurant reservation, or reporting a claim.
• Digital assistant – Many customers have been using neural TTS voices for their digital assistant solutions. We are introducing two styles in this area: a chat style for more casual, conversational bots, and a more professional style for scenarios such as in-car digital assistants.

Microsoft is announcing the following three emotion styles:

• Cheerful
• Empathetic
• Lyrical

The newscast style speech is already used in the Bing mobile app, check out the demo video below.

Source: Microsoft