Speech synthesis and AI voice: the complete guide

Not long ago a "computer voice" meant the robotic drone of a car navigator. Today a neural network reads text so well you can't tell it from a real narrator: with intonation, pauses and emotion — in English and dozens of other languages. It can also clone your voice, change someone else's and turn audio back into text. This is speech synthesis and speech processing.

This guide is a connected conversation, not a list of services. From how a machine turns text into living speech to concrete tasks: voice over a script, build a narrator for video, change a voice, clone your own and turn a recording into text.

Type any text right here, in the Twelver chat — and hear a neural network read it aloud. Your first generations are free after signing up.

Two sides of one technology

This guide has two mirror-image tasks. Speech synthesis (text-to-speech, TTS) turns text into a voice: voice-overs, narrators, audiobooks, voice assistants. Speech recognition (speech-to-text) does the opposite, turning a voice into text: transcripts, subtitles, notes from a voice memo. In between sits work on timbre: changing and cloning a voice.

One thing ties it all together: the quality of the output is the quality of the input. Clean text with the right markup sounds alive; a clean recording is transcribed accurately. That is what this guide teaches.

Contents

1. 1.Voice over text: how to turn text into speech
2. 2.A voice for video: a narrator without recording
3. 3.Change a voice with a neural network
4. 4.Voice cloning with a neural network
5. 5.ElevenLabs: what it is and how to use it
6. 6.Transcribe audio to text