Does TTS have a place in telephony?
Text to speech definitely has a place in telephony. The major advantage of TTS is that it is near instantaneous – so ideal for delivering instant recordings when speed is important. But the TTS engines, though human sounding, do not yet have the emotion and empathy a real voice can deliver.
The range of characters is currently also limited to a few for each language from each major TTS vendor. PromptVoice Portal offers the best of both worlds with its ‘Use a TTS recording until the real voice-over is available’ option, where a TTS recording is instantly available but is automatically replaced by the real human recording as soon as it is edited and quality checked.
Which text to speech vendor is best?
We are often asked, “Which TTS engine is better, Amazon Polly, Google, IBM or Microsoft?”. The answer is that it is different for different languages and dialects.
The quality of the TTS is dependent on the engine and the input recordings used to create the TTS character. The best male Irish TTS character may be produced by a different manufacturer from the best female Irish character. Ultimately there is no global ‘best’… even for a particular gender/language, as it depends what persona you're looking for.
With all major TTS engines included in PromptVoice Portal, we offer customers the ability to compare the best of breed TTS characters within the portal to find the one that best matches the tone of voice they are seeking.