Microsoft's Neural Text-To-Speech service now supports English and Hindi Languages

Microsoft India unit has now revealed that it has added English (India) and Hindi to its neural text to speech (Neural TTS) service language set.

According to the announcement, neural TTS is a part of the Azure Cognitive Services and converts text to lifelike speech. The service also provides customizable voices, flexible deployment from cloud to edge, and fine-tuned auto control.

Sundar Srinivasan, General Manager, Microsoft India (R&D) Pvt. Ltd., said, "Our text-to-speech services have played a key role in democratizing information reach and empowering people and organizations. Through the inclusion of English (India) and Hindi in Neural TTS, we are demonstrating our continued commitment to refining speech and voice-based services for personal and business use in India. We will continue to drive further advancements in speech services to empower people wherever they are to access information easily."

The solution can help virtual assistants and chatbots sound more natural and is used to convert digital texts such as ebooks into audiobooks as well as in-car navigation systems.

The solution maintains privacy and enterprise-grade security via data encryption.

Neural TTS is used by several companies across the sectors such as entertainment, retail, telecom, media, and manufacturing.

Online business to business marketplace Udaan, for example, uses the text to speech in Azure to develop conversational interfaces for their voice assistants.

Some other new languages introduced are Danish, Catalan, Polish, Finnish, Russian, Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, Arabic, Thai, and Swedish, notes the announcement.