Smart speech synthesis

Bit teamed up with a leading newspaper in the Netherlands to prototype a voice synthesis software that would unleash the innovation’s potential to the fullest in the context of Dutch media landscape.

01
Inform

Challenge 


Big Tech is currently in a state of vigorous development and is expected to continue its evolution all the way through the following decades. Although the industry giants are already offering numerous voice assistive technologies on the market, TTS software is still not fostered to their fullest potential. In addition to this, while English TTS has a clear room for improvement, Dutch speech synthesis is frankly lagging behind in terms of grammar and speech articulation due to the low adoption. Seeking to tackle this issue, Bit teamed up with a Dutch media group to prototype the voice synthesis software that would unleash the innovation's capacities in the context of local digital landscape.

02
Analyse

Solution 


During the course of the project, Bit has designed an addition to the voice synthesis of Microsoft Azure - a cloud computing service with a speech feature that converts text to lifelike speech. After building up upon the base layer, our research team developed an evolving lexicon of Dutch words that usually happen to be mispronounced by the TTS software and pre-processed the news articles in such a way that it enhances the TTS system by Azure, for instance, pronunciation of large numbers or punctuation. In order to handle this issue, we had to resort to the use of phonetic transcriptions, therefore signifying to the system how certain words and complex sentences should be articulated. Subsequently, the speechmaker dashboard was established for experimenting with various voice settings, such as pitch, speed, and even computerized speakers. After making additional adjustments regarding the structure and going through the general validation, Bit developed a substantial demo version of Dutch TTS, which was furtherly refined and integrated into the digital newsletter of our partner media entity.

03
Activate

Results

As a result, users are now able to play the headlines and enjoy the high quality of the speech synthesis, whilst our client, on the other hand, directly benefits from the developments of Big Tech and remains a forerunner in the Dutch media landscape.

  • Integration of the high qualitative Dutch speech synthesis
  • Expansion of the younger audience
  • More involvement from existing members

Related Cases

Traffic Management System - TMS

With the development of the Traffic Management System (TMS) for one of the largest airports in Europe, our team increased the capacity of intersections by 33% and reduced vehicle delay by up to 50% during rush hours.
This is some text inside of a div block.

Transportation

De Goudse

Bit collaborated with the Dutch insurance company De Goudse on a risk assessment application to implement technologies for something that actually matters.
This is some text inside of a div block.

Nature

Predictive power to save the energy

Our team designed and trained an AI tool that successfully anticipates the defect of a wind turbine, thus allowing the engineers to execute a prompt check-up.
This is some text inside of a div block.

Energy