IBM Introduces Neural Voices for Arabic, Dutch, Korean, Australian English, and Mandarin Chinese
Meet our newest Neural Voices! They join the Watson Text to Speech portfolio to strengthen your ability to serve customers across the globe. Neural Voices improve customer interaction with a clear, crisp, natural sound.

In this release, we have updated eight existing voices for Arabic, Dutch, Korean, and Mandarin Chinese. We also added two new voices for Korean and two new voices for Australian English. All voices are available in the IBM public cloud.

Selection of Voice Samples

Here are samples from each new language added. We’ve released seven other new Neural Voices as well, which you can listen to in our catalog.

Australian English - Craig

Arabic - Omar

Dutch - Emma

Korean - Si-Woo

Mandarin Chinese - Zhang Jing

Neural Technology

These new voices sound natural because they leverage deep neural networks (already in use for other languages in the IBM portfolio). Previous training techniques synthesized speech by connecting small segments of speech, called phones, to form words. This method can lead to choppiness. Neural Voices, on the other hand, employ deep neural networks (DNNs) in their prosody and acoustic models. Deep neural networks produce more natural sounding voices, even with less training data. Neural Voices also require less customization, since they sound smooth out of the box. With this release, IBM now offers Neural Voices or Enhanced Neural Voices for all supported languages.

Below is a diagram of the steps of neural synthesis at runtime. Your text is analyzed, then deep neural networks predict the pitch and phoneme durations (prosody), spectral structure, and waveform of the speech.
['Rachel Liddell']
['Watson Assistant', 'Deep Neural Networks', 'Neural Networks', 'Announcements', 'Watson Text To Speech']