What are text-to-speech systems for

Text-to-speech systems have an enormous range of applications. Their first real use was in reading systems for the blind, where a system would read some text from a book and convert it into speech. These early systems of course sounded very mechanical, but their adoption by blind people was hardly surprising as the other options of reading braille or having a real person do the reading were often not possible. Today, quite sophisticated systems exist that facilitate human computer interaction for the blind, in which the TTS can help the user navigate around a windows system. 

The mainstream adoption of TTS has been severely limited by its quality. Apart from users who have little choice (as in the case with blind people), people s reaction to old style TTS is not particularly positive. While people may be somewhat impressed and quite happy to listen to a few sentences, in general the novelty of this soon wears off. In recent years, the considerable advances in quality have changed the situation such that TTS systems are more common in a number of applications. Probably the main use of TTS today is in call-centre automation, where a user calls to pay an electricity bill or book some travel and conducts the entire transaction through an automatic dialogue system Beyond this, TTS systems have been used for reading news stories, weather reports, travel directions and a wide variety of other applications. 

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