Classes

The IBM Watson™ Text to Speech service provides APIs that use IBM’s speech-synthesis capabilities to synthesize text into natural-sounding speech in a variety of languages, dialects, and voices. The service supports at least one male or female voice, sometimes both, for each language. The audio is streamed back to the client with minimal delay. For speech synthesis, the service supports a synchronous HTTP Representational State Transfer (REST) interface and a WebSocket interface. Both interfaces support plain text and SSML input. SSML is an XML-based markup language that provides text annotation for speech-synthesis applications. The WebSocket interface also supports the SSML <mark> element and word timings. The service offers a customization interface that you can use to define sounds-like or phonetic translations for words. A sounds-like translation consists of one or more words that, when combined, sound like the word. A phonetic translation is based on the SSML phoneme format for representing a word. You can specify a phonetic translation in standard International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) representation or in the proprietary IBM Symbolic Phonetic Representation (SPR). The service also offers a Tune by Example feature that lets you define custom prompts. You can also define speaker models to improve the quality of your custom prompts. The service support custom prompts only for US English custom models and voices. IBM Cloud®. The Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, Australian English, and Korean languages and voices are supported only for IBM Cloud. For phonetic translation, they support only IPA, not SPR.