Definition
Text-to-speech (TTS) converts written text into spoken audio. In business voice systems it lets IVR prompts, voice OTPs, reminders and AI voice agents speak dynamic content without pre-recording every sentence.
A TTS engine normalises the text (expanding numbers, dates, currencies and abbreviations), works out pronunciation and prosody, and synthesises audio. Neural voices sound far more natural than older concatenative voices, and many engines let you choose language, gender, speaking rate and style.
Pronunciation and pacing can be controlled with SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language), a W3C standard supported by most engines. Typical uses: reading a code digit by digit, inserting pauses, spelling out letters, or forcing how a brand name is pronounced.
Arabic needs extra care. Written Arabic usually omits short vowels (tashkeel), so the engine has to guess them and can mispronounce names or rare words; numbers can be read in Arabic or English; and users may expect Modern Standard Arabic or a Gulf dialect depending on the use case. Test real prompts with native speakers before launch.
Common mistakes are reading long strings too fast, letting the engine read an OTP as one large number, and mixing languages in one sentence without marking the switch.
OmniChannels.ai, through BroadNet's voice capability, offers text-to-speech including Arabic for IVR, voice OTP and programmable calls.
Example
<speak>Your code is <say-as interpret-as="characters">471902</say-as>. <break time="700ms"/> I repeat…</speak>