What is Deep Learning and How Will it Change Text-to-Speech?

Text-to-speech technology has advanced greatly over the past two decades. Once defined by the robotic sounding voices that they produced, text-to-speech voices today can sound just as lifelike as an actual human. Today, making a natural sounding text-to-speech voice is labor intensive and expensive. The two most popular methods, HMM and USS, require hours of recordings from a voice actor. Then, computer programmers with an understanding of linguistics must break down all of that audio into the tiniest possible pieces, called phonemes, and appropriately tag them and define the rules for when each individual unit of speech should be used.