Microsoft neural text to speech service now supports Hindi

Technology giant Microsoft’s India unit on Tuesday said that it has added English (India) and Hindi to its neural text to speech (Neural TTS) service language set. 

The languages are among the 15 new dialects added to the service, a statement said.

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

The solution makes chatbots and virtual assistants 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 through data encryption.

“Through the inclusion of Indian English 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,” Sundar Srinivasan, general manager, research and development (R&D), Microsoft India, said in a statement.

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

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

Other new languages introduced are Arabic (Egypt and Saudi Arabia), Danish, Finnish, Catalan, Polish, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, Thai, Swedish, and Chinese (Cantonese Traditional and Taiwanese Mandarin). 

In total, Microsoft TTS supports 110 voices and over 45 languages and variants.