- [Instructor] In the language translator app
that I'm going to build for you later in this lesson
we'll be using Watson's text to speech capabilities
to convert both English and Spanish text
into English and Spanish audio, respectively.
Now, the Watson service as you might expect
is much more powerful than that.
In fact, you have the ability to use what's known as
Speech Synthesis Markup Language or SSML
to control how the voice actually speech the text.
So things like voice inflection,
the speed at which the person is speaking,
the pitch of their voice and other things
can be controlled and you can look up
SSML online to see what the syntax
of that XML-based language is.
Now at the time of this recording,
there are voices for both U.S. and U.K. English,
and then French, German, Italian,
Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese
and they'll probably have other languages in the future.
So let's go ahead and take a look at this demo
which I've already opened up for you
and over here you'll see that they have quite a number
of options for you to choose from
and we selected this very first one
for a U.S. English Allison voice
that has expressive capabilities
which I thought was interesting.
So this is the text that she's actually going to speak.
This is the same text marked up with SSML
and you'll see there's some tags in here
such as the fact that the next sentence
should be expressed as an apology
and then this sentence should be expressed with uncertainty
and finally this sentence should
be expressed as good news.
So as I play this audio back for you
listen as this text is being spoken
to how the voice changes based on those items.
- [Woman's Voice] I have been assigned
to handle your order status request.
I am sorry to inform you that the items
you requested are back-ordered.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
We don't know when those items will become available.
Maybe next week, but we are not sure at this time.
Because we want you to be a happy customer,
management has decided to give you a 50% discount.
- [Instructor] So you heard the different kind
of voice inflections as a result
of how the voice was told to express those sentences.
And you could envision potentially
combining something like this, for instance,
with the chat bot that we were looking at earlier
to give some level of voice interaction
with the user of your chat bot as well.