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Commerical TTS - Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft (2010s)
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== Historical Context == === Microsoft === Microsoft seriously entered the field of text-to-speech with the recruitment of the speech scientist Dr. Xuedong Huang, one of developers of the SPHINX-II system, a successor of [[Carnegie Mellon's Harpy System]]<ref>Huang, X., Alleva, F., Hon, H. W., Hwang, M. Y., Lee, K. F., & Rosenfeld, R. (1993). The SPHINX-II speech recognition system: an overview. ''Computer Speech & Language'', ''7''(2), 137-148.</ref>. With Huang at the wheel, Microsoft developed their Speech Application Programming Interface (API), for speech recognition and speech synthesis applications inside the Windows 2000 and Windows XP operating systems<ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Speech_API</ref><ref>Këpuska, V., & Bohouta, G. (2017). Comparing speech recognition systems (Microsoft API, Google API and CMU Sphinx). ''Int. J. Eng. Res. Appl'', ''7''(03), 20-24.</ref>. An early application from this line of development is Microsoft Sam, a male text-to-speech voice that was used by the Microsoft Narrator, a screen reading application that is meant as an accessibility feature for the visually impaired<ref name=":0">https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/complete-guide-to-narrator-e4397a0d-ef4f-b386-d8ae-c172f109bdb1</ref>. The development of more natural sounding text-to-speech systems then moved to Whistler, a trainable system that aimed to move away from concatenative and formant synthesis methods by generalizing from data instead <ref>Huang, X., Acero, A., Adcock, J., Hon, H. W., Goldsmith, J., Liu, J., & Plumpe, M. (1996, October). Whistler: A trainable text-to-speech system. In ''Proceeding of Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. ICSLP'96'' (Vol. 4, pp. 2387-2390). IEEE.</ref>. Other advancements included [[Hidden Markov Models in Speech Synthesis|Hidden Markov Models]] and later Microsoft moved to [[Deep Learning Revolution|deep neural networks]] like others<ref name=":1">Acero, A. (1999). Formant analysis and synthesis using hidden Markov models. In ''Sixth European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology''.</ref><ref>Dahl, G. E., Yu, D., Deng, L., & Acero, A. (2011). Context-dependent pre-trained deep neural networks for large-vocabulary speech recognition. ''IEEE Transactions on audio, speech, and language processing'', ''20''(1), 30-42.</ref><ref>https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-s-new-neural-text-to-speech-service-helps-machines-speak-like-people/</ref>. Later versions of Windows added more natural sounding voices with different accents to Narrator and their other services, but the Microsoft Speech API remains a key part in their development. === Google === Google began exploring text-to-speech (TTS) in earnest when it acquired the British-based artificial company, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_DeepMind DeepMind], in January 2014.<ref>Hodson, H. (n.d.). DeepMind and Google: The battle to control artificial intelligence.</ref> Though DeepMind maintains a portion of control over its intellectual property, exclusive of Google, the foundations derived from the subsidiary have helped create some of the widely recognized devices that utilize TTS today. In 2016, DeepMind revealed to the world WaveNet, a deep neural network for generating raw audio waveforms.<ref>Oord, A. van den, Dieleman, S., Zen, H., Simonyan, K., Vinyals, O., Graves, A., Kalchbrenner, N., Senior, A., & Kavukcuoglu, K. (2016). WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio (arXiv:1609.03499). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1609.03499</ref> Following the release of WaveNet, Google began to create and refine multiple products, utilizing WaveNet’s model, including Google Assistant, released in the same year, and eventually Google Cloud Speech API, released in 2017. The power that WaveNet had over other TTS models was clear, as Google Assistant began to take the stage as the forefront of Intelligent Personal Assistants, overtaking both Siri and Cortant, and only being matched by Alexa in some regards.<ref>Berdasco, A., López, G., Diaz, I., Quesada, L., & Guerrero, L. A. (2019). User Experience Comparison of Intelligent Personal Assistants: Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri and Cortana. Proceedings, 31(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.3390/proceedings2019031051</ref> === Amazon === Amazon, established in 1994 by Jeff Bezos, began as an online bookstore, expanding into various domains as technology evolved<ref>Byers, A. (2007). Jeff Bezos: the founder of Amazon. com. The Rosen Publishing Group.</ref>. It dove into TTS when it launched the Kindle 2 in 2009, which had a "Read-to-Me" feature<ref>Stone, B. (2013). The everything store: Jeff Bezos and the age of Amazon. Random House.</ref>. This was a landmark moment as it integrated TTS technology into a mainstream commercial product.
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