Part 4/13:
Historically, early TTS systems produced monotonous, robotic voices. Today, AI-driven TTS can produce speech indistinguishable from humans—used in Netflix productions, voice assistants, and even dubbing for movies. This leap forward owes much to fundamental breakthroughs like Transformers, self-supervised learning (SSL), and scaling data and compute resources.
The speaker highlights how SSL allows models to learn from large quantities of diverse, even noisy data, reducing the need for high-quality labeled datasets. This scalability has expanded the horizons of TTS, enabling models trained on millions of hours of speech data across multiple languages.