Embracing inclusivity with Azure Cognitive Speech Service

What is Speech Services?

Speech service refers to a technology or platform that allows users to convert spoken language into written text or vice versa. This can include services like automatic speech recognition (ASR), which is the technology that enables devices like smartphones and smart speakers to understand and respond to voice commands.

Speech service can also include technologies like text-to-speech (TTS), which can generate synthetic speech from written text. This is used in applications like virtual assistants and audiobooks.

Overall, speech service technologies play a critical role in enabling natural and intuitive communication between humans and machines and are becoming increasingly important as more and more devices become voice-enabled.

Steps to Create and Embrace Inclusivity using Speech Services

• Log in to the Azure portal (https://portal.azure.com/)
• Search Speech service in the search bar.
• First, provide an Azure subscription.
• Create a new resource group.
• Choose the Azure region and provide a Name
• And then choose the pricing tier.
• Finally, click the Review + Create button.
• You will get a popup message stating that Validation passed.
• Then you click create button.
• The deployment started initialized in a minute or two it will become successful.

Click the Goto Resource button.

Click the Goto Speech Studio link.

Click Text to Speech Service in that click the Voice Gallery option.

Click the Try Out Voice Gallery option.

Voice Gallery

Build apps and services that speak naturally, choosing from 456 voices across 147 languages and variants. Bring your scenarios to life with highly expressive and humanlike neural voices.

We have different speaking styles like Shouting, Terrified, Unfriendly, Sports commentary, Sad, Serious, Poetry, Newscast, Gentle, Hopeful, Lyrical, Friendly, Envious, Excited, Empathetic, Depressed, Documentary, Customer service, Chat, Cheerful, Calm, Angry, Advertisement, Affectionate and others.

We can choose different audiobooks and voice assistants in the Examples by use case tab.

The users can see the text option above, and also they can click the play button.

You can see the Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML).

If the user wants to edit the contents, click the option Edit in Audio Content Creation.

The users can also create their audio content creation and craft nuanced speech by adjusting the speaking style, pacing, and pronunciation of their spoken content.

Click Start an Audio Content Creation Project.

Click the Text file in the New tab.

In the File tab, click the New Text file option.

Users can choose if they want to change their Voice Style and Language style.

Add Pronunciation style as well.

In the Voice section, the users can select the Language style and Gender option.

Finally, click Confirm button.

The users can type the content in the content section.

Click the Play button.

 

Embrace Inclusivity

Inclusiveness is an essential aspect of responsible AI and refers to the idea that AI systems should be designed and developed in a way that takes into account the needs and perspectives of all members of society, regardless of their race, gender, ethnicity, age, religion, or other factors. One way to promote inclusiveness in AI is to ensure that training data is diverse and representative of the population. This means collecting and using data from a wide range of sources and ensuring that the data is not biased towards any particular group, especially Gender Diversity, and Inclusivity.

Summary

In this article, we successfully created and embraced Inclusivity using Speech Services. We explored different capabilities of Speech Service Studio, including Voice Gallery, Use cases by example templates, and Audio Content Creation customization.