TTS (Text-to-Speech) — AI Glossary

Reference details

Related terms

• ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition)
• Multimodal AI

Example: Where synthetic speech still gives itself away

Not tone — prosody on unfamiliar strings. Addresses, product codes, initialisms and mixed-language names are where pacing and stress go wrong, because the model has to guess how something is said. Evaluate on your actual content, not on the vendor's demo sentences.

Commonly confused with

Voice cloning is not the same as voice synthesis. Synthesis generates speech from text in some voice; cloning reproduces a specific person's voice, which carries consent and likeness obligations that ordinary TTS does not.

When to use it

Reach for it when:

• Content must be consumed hands-free or eyes-free
• Accessibility requires an audio channel
• Latency budgets allow streaming synthesis in a voice interface

Reach for something else when:

• Cloning a voice without documented consent
• Precise pronunciation matters and you cannot supply a lexicon
• The text is dense reference material better read than heard

Referenced by

This term is used by the following ModelRefs references:

• speech pipeline stack
• voice realtime stack

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