Azure Cognitive Services releases new languages and voices for Neural Text-to-Speech

 This post is co-authored with Qinying Liao, Binggong Ding and Sheng Zhao

Azure Cognitive Services releases new languages and voices for Neural Text-to-Speech

Neural Text-to-Speech (Neural TTS), a powerful speech synthesis capability of Azure Cognitive Services, enables developers to convert text to lifelike speech using AI. Businesses utilize Neural TTS for voice assistants, content read aloud capabilities, accessibility tools, and more. The Azure TTS product team is continuously working on bringing new languages to the world.

In January of 2022, 10 new locales were introduced to reach 129 languages. In addition, 36 new prebuilt voices are available in preview for a growing list of languages. Users can now also choose from multiple pre-set voices or record their own sample with custom neural voice.

With other Cognitive Services including Speech-to-Text, OCR and Translator extended to 100+ languages, Azure AI is one big step closer to its ambition to empower every organization and everyone on the planet to achieve more, without any language barriers.

10 new languages

While there are thousands of spoken languages in the world, the top 1% (~70 language) accounts for the 80%+ of the global population. Within just a few years of development, the TTS technology has been available in many commonly spoken languages and has been updated in these languages with many advanced features available. However, due to the lack of training data or business needs, there is almost nothing available for those less spoken languages. Inspired by the vision to remove the language barrier for everyone and powered by the low resource setting TTS technology, we keep working to expand our capability to support those less touched languages in the world.

Today, we are adding 10 new languages to our neural TTS portfolio. This is just a small portion compared to our goal, but we are on the way!

Check out how the voices in these languages in samples below:

Discover the full list of supported languages for Neural Text to Speech, in addition to Microsoft Edge Read aloud.

36 new voices are in preview for some popular languages

For each languages’ prebuilt voice, we have provided one female and one male voice. However, in the real world, there are scenarios that require one or more voices to reflect diversity and natural conversation. To directly address customer feedback, our English (US) and Chinese (China) have released more than 2 prebuilt voices, we also work rapidly to bring the same experience to more languages. In this release, we are starting to introduce total 36 new voices in preview for English (UK), French (France) and German (Germany).

These new voices will cover different persona and age groups, which can bring more choices and variety for your scenarios. These voices now are in public preview, which is available only in 3 regions: East US, West Europe and Southeast Asia.

We encourage you to try the new languages and voices below. Feedback is encouraged to help inform which voices will be made for General Availability in all regions, depending on customer satisfaction.

Neural TTS and Responsible AI

We are excited about the future of Neural TTS with human like, diverse and delightful quality under the high level architecture of XYZ-Code AI framework. Our technology advancements are also guided by Microsoft’s Responsible AI process, and our principles of fairness, inclusiveness, reliability & safety, transparency, privacy & security, and accountability. We put these ethical standards into practice through the Office of Responsible AI (ORA), which sets our rules and governance processes, the AI, Ethics, and Effects in Engineering and Research (Aether) Committee, which advises our leadership on the challenges and opportunities presented by AI innovations, and Responsible AI Strategy in Engineering (RAISE), a team that enables the implementation of Microsoft responsible AI rules across engineering groups.

Get started

Azure AI Neural TTS offers over 330 neural voices across 129 languages and variants. In addition, the Custom Neural Voice capability enables organizations to create a unique brand voice in multiple languages and styles.

For more information:

• Try the demo
• See our documentation
• Check out our sample code
• Check out the code of conduct for integrating neural TTS to your apps