By Muhammed Shafin P
Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
Introduction
When we think about text-to-speech (TTS) technology today, we usually think of systems that take text and produce speech directly. But these systems often sound too robotic or too perfect, and they give you very little control over how the voice behaves.
My concept takes a completely different approach, Instead of focusing on words as the basic unit, it starts from raw sounds, tones, phonemes, and emotional variations, and uses them as building blocks to manually construct speech.
This approach allows full control over every tiny detail of how speech sounds, and it can eventually work for any language or word, even ones that were never recorded before.
Stage 1: Building the Raw Sound Library
The core of the system is a library of raw sound material,
- These are not words or sentences,
- They are basic sound elements, vowel sounds, consonant sounds, variations of pitch, emotional tones, and frequency-modulated versions,
- Each sound type is tested, adjusted, and labeled, so it can be reused reliably,
Think of it like a paint palette,
You don’t store every possible painting,
You just store all the colors and tools needed to make any painting,
Similarly, this sound library stores all the colors of human sound, happy, sad, sharp, soft, fast, slow, so they can be combined later into any speech.
Stage 2: Manual Word Building from Blocks
Instead of typing text and getting an automatic result, the user builds words manually using these blocks.
For example, if the target is to create the word “ASAP”:
- Choose the sound block for “A” from the library,
- Adjust its controls, pitch, length, emotion, tone quality,
- Generate the sound for “A” using AI synthesis based on those settings,
- Choose the block for “SAP,” adjust its settings, and generate that too,
- If needed, add an extra vowel (like a soft “E” sound) to make the result more natural,
- Combine these generated parts together to form the full word,
This way, users have studio-like control over how every syllable sounds, but they don’t need to manually record anything.
AI’s Role: Smart Sound Generation
AI is not used here to directly generate entire phrases,
Instead, AI is used as a precision tool to generate sounds from the chosen building blocks and settings,
For example:
- If the user picks “A” + sad tone + 1.2 second length, AI produces exactly that version of “A”
- If the user picks “P” with a high-pitch energetic tone, AI generates that
This makes AI a sound synthesizer, not a full speech engine.
The Software Marketplace
The platform will also include a sound marketplace where creators and sound designers can:
- Contribute new raw sound blocks, emotional variants, or frequency-modulated samples,
- Have them verified for quality and added to the shared library,
- Make them available to users who want a larger variety of sound options,
This allows the system to constantly grow with new emotional styles, new voices, and new sound textures, making it more flexible over time.
Advantages of This Approach
- Infinite Vocabulary: Since speech is built from basic sounds, any word or language can be generated, no need to record entire dictionaries
- Total Control: Users can control pitch, length, speed, emotion, and intensity for each part of speech
- Natural Sounding: By adding small extra sounds (like soft vowels, breaths, or transitions), the result feels realistic and human
- Future-Proof: As AI improves, this process can become semi-automated, letting AI suggest the right blocks and settings, but still allowing manual fine-tuning
A Practical Example
Let’s say we want to create:
“ASAP, please!” in a worried tone.
Steps might look like this:
- Generate “A” from the sound library with worried emotional settings,
- Generate “SAP” with slightly faster timing to make it sound urgent,
- Add a soft “E” sound between A and SAP for smoother flow,
- Generate “please” with the same emotional settings,
- Combine them in sequence to make the full phrase,
The result: a natural, expressive phrase that feels like a human spoke it, but created entirely from synthetic sound blocks.
The Future Vision
In the future, this process can be partly or fully automated,
AI could suggest the right blocks, apply emotional settings automatically, and generate entire phrases while still letting users tweak details.
This could revolutionize:
- Voice acting: Generate perfectly tuned lines for movies or games
- Virtual assistants: Give them personality and emotion that feels alive
- Accessibility tools: Allow people to construct speech exactly as they want it to sound
- Music and art: Treat voice as an instrument, with complete freedom over tone and style
Conclusion
This concept is about giving creators raw sound material and powerful AI tools to construct speech exactly how they imagine it, manually now, automatically in the future.
Instead of AI doing everything in a black box, this system lets users be part of the creative process, selecting, controlling, and fine-tuning every sound until it feels just right.
It’s not just another TTS system, it’s a new way to think about speech generation:
Manual assembly of AI-generated building blocks, powered by a growing library of verified raw sounds.
This is a concept by Muhammed Shafin P.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0