Microsoft adds more English (Indian) and Hindi voices to its TTS Azure AI speech services

Microsoft continues to expand the number of TTS (text-to-speech) AI-generated voices for customers of its Azure AI services. Today, the company announced a big expansion for its India-based users.

In a blog post, Microsoft announced it has added 11 all-new English (India) and Hindi AI female and male voices in all Azure regions. Specifically, the service now has six new voices for English (India) and five new voices for Hindi (India). Microsoft says all of them have unique voice characteristics.

In addition, it has upgraded the company's previously released default English (Indian) and Hindi AI voices to sound more natural and be more expressive when used. This is due to a new feature called Styles. Microsoft stated:

You can now make the voices sound ‘Empathetic’, ‘Newscast’ and ‘Cheerful’ based on the required emotional tone. These changes bring a more dynamic nature to the existing Default voices.

Finally, Microsoft announced even more Indian language support, adding three new locales (Assamese, Punjabi, and Oriya) with female and male voices. That means there are now 13 different local Indian languages that are available with the company's Azure AI voices, which covers over 90 percent of the Indian market.

Microsoft also revealed some of the technical details on how they added all of these new Indian AI voices for Azure customers.

• Styles in Neerja and Swara: In addition to the existing Default style, we have incorporated style inputs and training data to generate speech in 3 more styles: Cheerful, Newscast and Empathetic, which can be used based on the business requirement.
• New bilingual en-IN and hi-IN voices: We utilized advanced bilingual lexicon and acoustic modelling techniques to enable seamless transitions between English and Hindi words to build new voices each with a unique persona.
• New Indian locales: We utilized high quality data for each of these locales to build TTS voices, leveraging the latest technological advancements in modelling, such as DelightfulTTS2 and MuLanTTS.

The new Indian AI voices continue a trend from Microsoft this year for expanding the number of AI voices worldwide for Azure users. The company now has over 400 TTS voices covering over 140 languages and locales.