In an era where value is measured by the amount of web traffic digital platforms create, text content popularity continues to dwindle, especially among younger audiences, where visual and audio content tops the list of formats creating most engagement.

One solution, text-to-speech (TTS) technology, generates synthetic audio speech from digital text. According to Aby Louw, senior engineer at the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, its origins date back to 1779, when Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein first created a model that produced synthetic vowel sounds with bellows. Since then, the technology continued to evolve until the creation of Statistical Parametric Speech Synthesis, which is currently used to generate synthetic speech. The voice technology has reshaped communication services over the past few decades.