Azure Neural TTS Web Player: let your website speak for itself

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Microsoft Tech Community - Latest Blogs - .

Neural Text-to-Speech (Neural TTS) is the innovative speech synthesis capability of Azure Cognitive Services. This cutting-edge technology harnesses the power of AI to transform written text into astonishingly lifelike speech, offering a world of possibilities for businesses looking to enhance their voice assistants, content read-aloud capabilities, and accessibility tools.

The latest advancements in Azure Neural TTS technology have made it easier than ever for developers to integrate TTS functionality into their web pages, delivering a seamless read-aloud experience for those on the go. By eliminating the complexity of calling the service, developers can focus on creating read-aloud experiences without worrying about server-side programming with built-in caching functionality and standard frontend libraries.

This blog introduces TTS web player , a web plug-in that helps you to discover the benefits of integrating Azure Neural TTS with your websites and take your user experience to the next level. With reduced integration time, cost savings, enhanced user engagement and accessibility, there's no reason not to explore the possibilities of Neural TTS for web content reading today.

Benefits of TTS web player

Integrating a TTS web player can provide several benefits, including:

Enhanced accessibility and user experience: With the TTS web player, you can provide enhanced user experience by enabling users to listen to your content rather than just reading it. This is particularly useful for users with visual impairments or dyslexia. It also explicitly meets accessibility requirements, making your website inclusive to all users. The TTS web player supports both mobile phone and desktop devices, allowing users to access your content while driving or working. In addition, using the TTS web player ensures that your web content is audible across all browsers, including those that may not support built-in read-aloud features. By improving accessibility and experience, the TTS web player can help you reach a wider audience and make a bigger impact.

Reduced integration time: Say goodbye to long, tedious integrations. With the TTS web player, you can quickly and easily leverage provided libraries and integrate read-aloud features into your web pages. With automatic text extraction, anonymous authentication, and the JS libraries provided, you can save time and estimate just one man-day integration cost for the most generic scenario.

1. The TTS web player integration will not need server-side programming.
2. The TTS web player offers native support for multiple platforms, including JavaScript libraries and WordPress, which can help streamline the integration process on the client side.
3. With XPath or JSONPath provided, the text will be automatically extracted from web pages for speech audio synthesis.
4. Easily anonymous authentication: JavaScript client library can request Azure TTS RESTAPI directly without additional authentication.

Cost Savings: With automatic audio caching, the TTS web player can help you to reduce latency and save cost for dynamic content. Audio can be generated dynamically and cached for repeated playback by different users, saving you the expense of generating new audio each time.

Example of websites incorporated with TTS web player

Microsoft Tech Community

The Microsoft Technology Community Blog is a hub for tech enthusiasts, developers, and IT professionals. With TTS web player, Microsoft Technology Community was able to save time and resources that could have been required to make the blog content more accessible to people with different needs. Now, the Microsoft Technology Community Blog can offer an inclusive and accessible experience to all its users.

How to integrate the TTS web player into your website

Integrating a TTS web player is straightforward and only involves three steps:

Step 1: Register

• Create speech resource in Azure portal (check details).
• Select your voices in Voice Gallery
• Create an TTS player instance by contacting ttsplayer@microsoft.com, please provide below:
  1. The region and ID of your speech resource.
  2. The link to your website.

Step 2: Get samples

• Get client-side library and sample code (check details here)

Step3: Integrate and publish

• Integrate the TTS web player with your website 
• Publish your website

Get started

Microsoft offers over 400 neural voices covering more than 140 languages and locales. With these Text-to-Speech voices and TTS web player, you can quickly add them to let your website speak for itself with a more accessible web page design or a richer read-aloud experience for your users. In addition, with the Custom Neural Voice capability, you can easily create a brand voice for your business. 

The TTS web player feature is now open for registration. Please contact ttsplayer@microsoft.com to create a TTS web player instance and we would love to hear feedback or questions from you.