TTS — Text-to-Speech

TTS is the technology that turns written text into natural-sounding speech. Coming out of the classical concatenative and parametric era, the field moved to a modern deep-learning paradigm in 2017 with Google's Tacotron and WaveNet; products like ElevenLabs, OpenAI TTS, and Microsoft VALL-E pushed naturalness toward human-level in the 2020s. Much like Stable Diffusion for images, open-source models (Coqui XTTS, F5-TTS) energized a community ecosystem. It's the core component behind voice assistants, podcast production, dubbing, and accessibility tools.