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Commerical TTS - Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft (2010s)
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=== Microsoft === The first application of speech synthesis by Microsoft was in Windows 2000, with the release of Microsoft Narrator<ref name=":0" />. Narrator was subsequently improved to sound more natural, such as through formant analysis using [[Hidden Markov Models in Speech Synthesis|Hidden Markov Models]]<ref name=":1" /> and other [[Advancements in Neural Network-Based TTS (2000s)|advancements in neural network-based TTS]]. Microsoft also showed one of the first bilingual speech synthesis systems, called Mulan<ref>Chu, M., Peng, H., Zhao, Y., Niu, Z., & Chang, E. (2003, April). Microsoft Mulan-a bilingual TTS system. In ''2003 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2003. Proceedings.(ICASSP'03).'' (Vol. 1, pp. I-I). IEEE. </ref>. Mulan is a model that can switch between Mandarin and English within a sentence, maintaining the intonation and voice quality. This was a major development for text-to-speech, especially as the combination of tonal and stress languages normally proves to be difficult. The application of this technology was according to the authors mostly to allow for more natural sounding switching between English terms in Chinese text. In light of the [[Introduction of Voice Assistants|introduction of voice assistants]], Microsoft released [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/cortana Cortana] in April of 2014. Cortana was a personal digital assistant using speech recognition for user input and speech synthesis for system output, and was based on the Microsoft Speech API. However, by the end of 2023, Microsoft phased out Cortana out of most of its services in favour of Bing Chat AI and Windows Copilot<ref>https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/end-of-support-for-cortana-d025b39f-ee5b-4836-a954-0ab646ee1efa</ref>.
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