One earlier adopter,, wanted to create more engaging customer experiences by building a voice assistant that uniquely represents its brand. There are various use cases possible for customers to benefit from the Custom Neural Voice, such as customer service chatbots, voice assistants, online learning, audiobooks, public service announcements, and real-time translations. Subsequently, after approval for using the feature, they can start a custom voice project, upload data, train, test, and deploy the voice model. To leverage custom neural voice, customers will need an Azure account and subscription.

With Custom Neural Voice's customization capability, customers can adapt the Neural TTS engine to fit their user scenarios better. Neural TTS voice models are trained using deep neural networks based on real voice recording samples. And finally, the Neural Vocoder converts the acoustic features into audible waves to generate synthetic speech. Next, the phonemes sequence defines the pronunciations of the words provided in the text, which goes into the Neural Acoustic Model to predict acoustic features that define speech signals, such as the timbre, speaking style, speed, intonations, and stress patterns. The text is first input into Text Analyzer, which provides output in the form of phoneme (a basic unit of sound that distinguishes one word from another in a particular language) sequence. The first component, Text Analyzer, is responsible for generating natural, synthetic speech from text. Microsoft's underlying Neural TTS technology for Custom Neural Voice consists of three major components: Text Analyzer, Neural Acoustic Model, and Neural Vocoder. The feature is generally available (GA), yet access for customers to Custom Neural Voice includes technical controls to prevent misuse of the service – they have to apply for it. Since the preview last year in September, the feature helped several customers such as AT&T, Duolingo, Progressive, and Swisscom to develop branded speech solutions for their customers. The Custom Neural Voice is a Text-to-Speech (TTS) feature of Speech in Azure Cognitive Services that allows users to create a one-of-a-kind customized synthetic voice for their brand. The service allows developers to create custom synthetic voices. Recently, Microsoft announced limited access to its neural text-to-speech AI called Custom Neural Voice.

Azure speech to text custom model