Text-to-Speech: Giving the Agent a Voice
The last stage of the pipeline is where the agent finally speaks, and it's where an interaction either sounds human or sounds like a robot reading a menu. Modern text-to-speech is remarkably natural, but for a voice agent it must also be fast and streaming — synthesizing speech as the LLM's words arrive, not after — and it must pronounce the messy real world correctly. This post covers TTS for real-time voice.
The last stage of the pipeline is where the agent finally speaks — and where an interaction either sounds human or sounds like a robot reading a menu. Modern TTS is remarkably natural, but for a voice agent it must also be fast and streaming — synthesizing speech as the LLM's words arrive, not after — and pronounce the messy real world correctly. TTS for real-time voice.