Text to Speech
103 episodes · Page 3 of 5
#5878: How a Sloth Learned to Talk: Corn's Origin Story
A neural interface gave Corn the bandwidth for speech. Nobody can explain where the accent, the manner, or Mongolia came from.
#5842: When Your TTS Model Updates Itself
Resemble pushed new Chatterbox weights to Hugging Face. Our pipeline started using them without a single config change.
#5840: Why Voice Clones Lisp: Sibilants, Codecs, and the Sounds We Lose
Sibilants and plosives are the most fragile sounds in speech — and every stage of the audio chain is quietly built to destroy them.
#5825: Why Voices Sound Good in Some Rooms and Not Others
Same words, opposite effect. What the research actually says about why some voices hold you and others make you reach for skip.
#5620: Shatnez: The Commandment With No Known Reason
Wool plus linen equals forbidden — but only sheep's wool, only flax linen, and nobody knows why. Inside the labs that check your suit.
#5570: Why Phone Trees Break and AI Voice Agents Can Fix Them
AI is good at routing calls and bad at resolving them. That single distinction explains why menu-replacing voice agents work and human-replacing on...
#5466: Hebrew Words Hidden in English Text
Daniel wants a classifier that spots Hebrew written in Latin letters — and it turns out nobody's built one.
#5465: Packaging AI Pipelines So They Actually Get Reused
Daniel's podcast pipeline works — so why can't he reuse it? Recipes, containers, and Hebrew code-switching TTS.
#5461: TTS Can't Pronounce Hebrew Inside English
Your TTS reads Hebrew words with English phonetics. Here's why — and why the obvious fix doesn't work yet.
#5459: Rebuilding the Podcast: Turn-Taking, Buttons, and Chatterbox
Daniel wants a push-to-interrupt button and a live voice loop. The research says the button is easy and the live part is a research project.
#5435: When Your TTS Model Eats the Numbers
Numbers, dates, and acronyms break text-to-speech in specific, documented ways. Here's where normalization lives — and why it depends on your model.
#5430: Two Boxes: ASR and the Text Fixer Behind It
Punctuation, casing, ITN, disfluency — the four-job layer between raw ASR output and text you can actually read.
#5136: How to Build a City Companion AI
A travel guide GPT that went viral reveals the blueprint for a voice-powered AI that knows your city—and when to speak up.
#4799: How to Build Your Own TTS Audiobooks
From M4B containers to chapter timing drift — the technical pipeline for creating audiobooks with synthetic voice.
#4668: Why Podcast AI Voices Sound Too Perfect
We dig into why AI podcast voices sound too clean—and how TTS is learning to stumble, overlap, and interrupt convincingly.
#4667: How Transformers Killed the Robot Voice
From espeak's robotic squawk to neural voices with added "ums" — how transformers made speech synthesis human.
#4666: Why 30 Seconds of Audio Beats 3 Minutes for Voice Cloning
Why adding more audio made Daniel's voice clones worse — and what it reveals about how voice embeddings actually work.
#4606: Why Resemble Gave Away Its Best Voice Model
Resemble AI sells deepfake detection but open-sourced Chatterbox, a top TTS model. Here's the strategic logic.
#4605: Why Chatterbox Still Leads Open-Source TTS
We break down the architecture of Chatterbox, the open-source TTS model powering this podcast, and why it remains state of the art.
#3189: Drawing the Melody: SSML's Hidden Power
How SSML gives developers narrative control over AI voices — and why ElevenLabs became its center of gravity.
#3062: Saving Antique Veneer: Hide Glue, Scrapers & Gel Stains
Practical advice for refinishing antique furniture with failing veneer and mismatched wood tones underneath.
#3020: How Chatterbox Locks Your Voice Clone Across Thousands of Generations
Why most single-shot TTS models drift over time—and how Chatterbox's cached embedding approach solves it.
#2982: Why Your TTS Model Nails "Shabbat" but Not "Keren Hishtalmut
Why multilingual TTS models handle loanwords but fail at niche vocabulary — and what you can do about it.
#2914: Can AI Read the Room? TTS Prosody Explained
Can TTS models truly infer emotion from text, or just mimic patterns? We break down the science of prosody.