Voice is becoming increasingly popular in providing useful and engaging experiences for customers and employees. The Text-to-Speech (TTS) capability of Speech on Azure Cognitive Services allows you to quickly create intelligent read-aloud experience for your scenarios. In this blog, we'll walk through an exercise which you can complete in under two hours, to get started using Azure neural TTS voices and enable your apps to read content aloud. We'll provide high level guidance and sample code to get you started, and we encourage you to play around with the code and get creative with your solution! Read-aloud is a modern way to help people to read and consume content like emails and word documents more easily.

Google Assistant received more natural-sounding voice models again in October thanks to updated natural language processing and prosody models which use machine learning to understand and stitch together sentences with better intonation, rhythm, and stress. Now, they seem to be applying that same technology to Google Play Books in order to turn any book into an audiobook, and I totally saw it coming. The upcoming feature seeks to give an auto-generated narrator's voice to text-only books to make them more accessible and immersive. Google Play is working with publishers in the U.S. and the UK for the rollout and will make the publisher tool to create auto-narrated audiobooks available in early 2021 with a beta available now. Once set up for auto-narration, a user can choose between different machine learning and AI-created narrator voices like a cowboy named Tex, and more.