AI & Voice

TTS (Text-to-Speech)

Technology that generates spoken audio from text — used in voice agents, IVR, accessibility.

TTS models: ElevenLabs (high quality, expensive), Google Wavenet, Amazon Polly, Microsoft Azure, Reverie (Indian languages), Meta MMS, plus newer open-source like F5-TTS and Kokoro.

Key dimensions: voice quality (naturalness), language support, latency, and cost. Naturalness has improved dramatically — modern TTS is often indistinguishable from human within short clips. Latency under 200ms enables real-time agents.

Indian-language TTS is still uneven. Hindi has good support. Tamil/Telugu/Bengali decent. Marathi/Gujarati/Punjabi/Odia variable. Voice cloning from short samples (ElevenLabs) opens up brand-specific voices — useful for premium customer experience.

India context

Indian voice agents should default to female + soft Hindi/regional voice — unscientifically, women's voices land warmer in customer-service contexts. Using a regional voice for tier-2 cities (e.g., Tamil voice for Chennai) noticeably increases trust.

Examples

  • A Doggu voice agent uses ElevenLabs for English + Reverie for Hindi.
  • A premium clinic uses voice cloning of the doctor's actual voice for follow-up reminders.

FAQ

Which TTS is best for Indian languages?

Reverie for Hindi + regional. Azure for Hindi. Meta MMS for less-resourced languages. ElevenLabs for English with Indian accent (custom-cloned).

Is TTS expensive?

Varies widely. Polly/Azure ~₹0.5/1000 chars. ElevenLabs much higher (~₹40/1000 chars). Open-source (Kokoro, F5) free but require GPU hosting.

Can TTS sound human?

Modern models (ElevenLabs, OpenAI TTS) are nearly indistinguishable from human. Listeners can detect AI in 30+ seconds of audio; in 5-10 second clips, indistinguishable.

Related concepts

STTvoice agentIVRASRReverieElevenLabs

Doggu handles TTS (Text-to-Speech) compliance for you.

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Related glossary entries

STT (Speech-to-Text) — Technology that converts spoken audio to written text — foundation of voice agents and call transcription.

More in AI & Voice

STT (Speech-to-Text)RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)LLM (Large Language Model)Hallucination (AI)
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