Glossary
Text to speech
Generating spoken audio from text, with prosody natural enough not to announce itself.
- Also called
- TTS, speech synthesis
Modern synthesis is close to indistinguishable in short utterances. For voice agents, time-to-first-audio matters as much as quality.
Indian-language synthesis quality varies by language and by how much training data existed for it.
Latency to first audio is the metric that shapes user experience in a voice agent. A synthesis engine with beautiful prosody that takes eight hundred milliseconds to start speaking will feel worse than a plainer one that starts in two hundred, because the caller experiences the gap as a dropped line.
Pre-generate anything fixed. Greetings, menu options and confirmations do not change between calls, so synthesising them once and caching removes both latency and per-character cost from the most repeated parts of a conversation.
Voice selection is worth more attention than it usually gets. A voice that sounds excellent reading marketing copy can be wrong for a service line, where callers want clarity and neutrality rather than warmth, and testing two or three with real scripts settles it quickly.
Related terms, in context
The concepts you almost always meet alongside text to speech.
- Voice AI agent
- A phone agent that holds a real conversation, listening, reasoning and speaking within a conversational turn.
- Speech recognition
- Converting speech to text, with accuracy that depends heavily on accent, audio quality and domain.
Where this shows up in our work
Text to speech is not an abstraction for us. It is a decision we make on live projects. It shows up most directly in voice ai agents, where getting it wrong has a cost someone can measure.
If you are evaluating a vendor on this, the useful question is not whether they can define the term. It is what they measure, what they would refuse to do, and what happens in their system when the assumption behind text to speech stops holding.
Questions
What is Text to speech?
Generating spoken audio from text, with prosody natural enough not to announce itself.
Does Orqent Labs build this?
Yes, Voice AI Agents. We work across India, covering all 19,238 PIN codes remotely.
Building something that involves text to speech?
We will tell you honestly whether it is the right approach for your problem.
Or email bd@dtrasglobal.com · call +91 74118 77878