Speech Synthesis Engine – Building from Scratch

Building a speech synthesis engine from scratch using free and open-source tools can be a complex task, but it’s definitely possible.

To understand natural language processing and speech synthesis, start by learning more about them and experimenting with existing open-source TTS engines.

Choose a Text-to-Speech (TTS) Engine

There are several open-source TTS engines available, for example:

MaryTTS

A flexible, modular architecture for building TTS systems, including a voice-building tool for generating new voices from recorded audio data.

eSpeak

A compact open-source software speech synthesizer for English and other languages, for Linux and Windows.

Other options include DeepSpeech, Kaldi, Wav2Letter, SpeechBrain and Coqui.

Understand the Architecture:

A typical TTS engine includes components such as a markup language parser, a processor, and a synthesizer. Understanding these components will help you customize the engine to your needs.

Building a TTS engine

7 Best Open Source Text-to-Speech (TTS) Engines | DataCamp¹: This article provides an overview of seven well-known open-source TTS engines, including MaryTTS, eSpeak, and others. It also explains the basic components of a TTS engine, such as a markup language parser, a processor, and a synthesizer ¹.
How To Build a Text-to-Speech App with Web Speech API | DigitalOcean²: This tutorial guides you through building a text-to-speech app using the Web Speech API. It covers topics like getting a reference to a SpeechSynthesis object, checking for browser support, and getting available speech voices ².
Build a Customizable Text-to-Speech System from Scratch | Toolify.ai³ : This resource provides information on how to create an efficient and accurate text-to-speech engine that delivers high-quality speech ³.
Build text-to-speech from scratch | Medium⁴ : This series of articles guides you through building a toy text-to-speech model step-by-step ⁴.
Text-to-Speech with Tacotron2 — Torchaudio 2.3.0 documentation⁵ : This tutorial shows how to build a text-to-speech pipeline using the pretrained Tacotron2 in torchaudio ⁵.

These resources should provide a good starting point.

Implement the Engine

This involves writing code to implement the chosen TTS engine. You’ll need to integrate the parser, processor, and synthesizer components, and ensure they work together seamlessly

Customize the Engine

Depending on your needs, you might want to customize the engine. For example, you could create your own parsers, processors, and synthesizers to fit your specific needs¹.

Test and Refine

Finally, you’ll need to test your engine, refine its performance, and fix any bugs that arise.

Read a working example: How to generate Speech Synthesis Audio File

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