text-to-speech voice
Disney adds beloved characters as text-to-speech voices in TikTok – and bans them from saying 'lesbian' or 'gay'
A text-to-speech TikTok voice made by Disney that made users sound like Rocket Raccoon does not allow users to'say' words like "gay", "lesbian", or "queer". Numerous posts by users showed the feature failing to say the LGBTQ terms before it was quietly changed to allow the words. Words like "bisexual" and "transgender", were allowed by the feature. Originally, Rocket's voice would skip over the words when written normally but would be pronounced phonetically if a user wrote "qweer", for example. Attempts to make it read text that contained only the seemingly-prohibited words resulted in an error message saying that text-to-speech was not supported by the language chosen.
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.