Listen to this blog as an AI Podcast:

TL;DR - Text-to-speech robotically reads what you type or what’s on the page. AI-powered text-to-speech helps it to sound lifelike. AudioStack’s end-to-end production process delivers text-to-audio in a complete AI-powered audio production workflow, making audio that’s ready for compelling ad reads, news publishing, and so much more.

Let’s not beat around the bush. If you need to transform your written text (such as an ad read or a news article) into spoken text, you have two options: have a human read it, or use text-to-speech (TTS) technology.

As a brand or agency, you can understand the cost and time savings that come from having an alternative to hiring voice talent for every campaign. And, if you are a news publisher, you may have already used some form of text-to-speech technology to automatically create audio versions of articles on your website.

If you have the resources, you might also be using an AI speech platform to make those voices sound incredibly lifelike.

But if you’re looking to elevate your audio content with AI, voices are just one piece of the puzzle: and that’s where text-to-audio goes far beyond what’s achievable with TTS. We’ll explain it all here.

Only have 30 seconds? We'll break it down here:

1. What is traditional text-to-speech, and why still use it?

In plain English, text-to-speech (TTS) is a simple way of turning something written into something spoken without an actual human voice actor in the mix.

Without going into too many details, it works by piecing together individual soundbites from a bank of pre-recorded human voices to ‘read’ a text.

It might be the most limited of the options in this list, but TTS had (and still has) wide usage; from the robotic Microsoft Sam as a screenreader to the more vibrant ‘Jessie’ (the voice that narrates millions of TikToks.)

So, they have their functional and fun uses - but you wouldn’t want either to voice your next radio ad, news article, or speak to one another in a podcast.

That’s where AI-powered text-to-speech is changing the game.

2. What is AI-powered text-to-speech - or AI voice synthesis?

Speech has many aspects that we know make it human. Cadence, pitch, tone, intonation and  rhythm - but also things we simply don’t think about: breathing, stuttering and pauses.

So even if Jessie sounds human and she can tell the difference between a question, a list or a statement, it’s those missing elements that we instinctively pick up on that give her away as a computer-generated voice.

Text-to-speech is put together from (essentially) pre-recorded building blocks. With the most advanced AI-powered text-to-speech voices, lifelike human speech is generated ‘from scratch’.

Simply put, rather than taking sounds and stitching them together, AI voice synthesis platforms have been trained on vast quantities of speech data to ‘learn’ the underlying rules to speech (such as which letter combinations make which sounds, and how they might modify for different ‘moods’) and produce an output - a voice like this one:

With voice synthesis technology developed by providers such as ElevenLabs, Amazon (Polly), Respeecher and more, it’s possible to generate lifelike human voices with TTS that aren’t just more believable and specific (across moods, accents and delivery styles), but also far less error-prone.

And, unlike a conventional TTS voice, an AI voice can convincingly and emotively read an ad, an article, and even converse with another TTS voice in an AI podcast (the podcast version of this article is just that) with an excellent understanding of context that rivals a voice actor.

So where does that put AudioStack?

3. Is AudioStack an AI text-to-speech provider?

In a word, No. Just as speech is one part of your audio production process, AI-powered text-to-speech is just one part of AudioStack.

And that difference between text-to-speech and text-to-audio is hearable. If you write a script for an ad, an AI-powered TTS tool might give you this:

This is speech:

If you write a similar script in AudioStack, it can produce this: 

Of course, the obvious takeaway is that one is an engaging audio ad that’s ready to broadcast. 

But it’s the automation of the audio production workflow - and all of its elements - that’s truly revolutionary.

Unlike an AI-powered TTS tool, AudioStack empowers you to create, edit, produce and version consumer-facing audio content, not just voice it. And that’s not just for ads, either.

It’s article summaries with sonic branding for publishers, CTV voiceovers for agencies handling dynamic creative campaigns, and even audio demos for every prospect your audio sales team is reaching out to.

• Need to transform written content into audio content? See four ways you can do that here.

All because the slow, siloed processes behind audio production - voice, scriptwriting, production, AdOps - can be centralized and automated in a single platform.

That’s the difference between text-to-speech and AI-powered text-to-audio with AudioStack:

A final word on the audio production workflow…

By now, you know that AI voice is just one part of the entire audio experience. 

An AI voice solution can take the hassle, slowness and expense out of one part of the typical audio production process… but you still need to write scripts, mix and master ads, and address them at scale.

AudioStack is that end-to-end solution you need to supercharge your entire audio production process and achieve complex audio production needs such as dynamic creative, personalization and localization at 10x the speed for 1/10th of the effort.

Curious to learn more? Seeing is believing, so we invite you to a demo to see just how easy it is to create audio at scale with AudioStack: