Over a decade ago I was working primarily in text-to-speech at Lernout and Hauspie. We were developing state-of-the-art technology and we were very excited about it, even if we were going through a horrible financial period that would lead to L&H’s ultimate bankruptcy.

I was recently analysing some demos from TTS companies. I was surprised to see how little the field has advanced in the last 10 years. Surely enough, there have been certain  advances here and there, but these have been less than I expected. Something has gone wrong with the R&D focus of the companies involved – and public research organisations also have had their financial limitations.

Now I see the effort of certain major Internet corporations to use tts technology and I am thinking what they are aiming at.

I think these companies might be exploring some interesting ideas like offering in the middle term a framework for normal users to develop their own tts systems. I do not see just yet – or not necessarily just yet – a completely personalized own-voice module but something in the middle. This would require making users work for those corporations by training their own data. The vast majority of users won’t be able or willing to perform tasks such as  interpreting mappings into phonological interpretations of their speech or going too deep into any verification of speech segmentation. Still, I think it is perfectly possible to offer several methods through which users can be guided to provide input for machine learning processes that then deliver increasingly improved personal tts services

These companies will have the resources to support such frameworks…and at the same time profit from the users’ interactions. In the middle term I see a reduction in the amount of hours an Internet user will have to invest in order to get a free or nearly free tts system.

And this would be a huge challenge for companies specializing in tts technology. In a future post I will go deeper into that.