Text-to-speech
Also called TTS, read aloud, AI voices
Turning written text into spoken audio with a computer-made voice; modern AI voices pause, stress words and sound close to human.
Older computer voices read one word after another and sounded like it. Today's are trained on many hours of recorded speech, so they learn how people actually talk: where the pauses fall, which word in a sentence gets the weight, how a question rises at the end.
That makes them useful well beyond accessibility. People listen to articles, have emails read out while driving, or turn study notes into something to hear on a run. Some apps let you pick a voice, a speed or even a style of delivery.
The same technology, trained on one person's recordings, can copy that person's voice. That's where text-to-speech becomes voice cloning, and where it starts to matter for scams.
For example
You have a long article read to you on the walk to work, in a voice that sounds like a calm radio presenter.
Put it to use
Where you'll meet text-to-speech in ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, how to use it there, and the mix-up most people make.
Daily Bytes Plus is in the Android app.