# Text-to-speech development > Language design, pronunciation resources, voice evaluation, and product QA for natural synthesized speech. [Speech & voice AI capability](https://admas.net/capabilities/speech/index.md) ## The challenge A technically clear synthetic voice can still mispronounce names, flatten phrasing, mishandle numbers, or adopt a persona that feels wrong for the market. We define what the voice should sound like in context and turn language knowledge into pronunciation, text-normalization, prosody, and evaluation assets. Evaluation covers isolated output and complete product interactions, including long-form, dynamic, and high-risk content. ## How Admas works 1. **Design the voice behavior:** Define audience, persona, dialect, register, content types, pronunciation policy, and quality criteria. 2. **Build language resources:** Develop lexicons, normalization rules, phonetic guidance, exception handling, and evaluation sets. 3. **Evaluate in product:** Assess intelligibility, naturalness, prosody, pronunciation, consistency, and task fitness with native listeners. ## Typical outputs - Voice and language behavior specification - Pronunciation and normalization resources - Native-listener evaluation program - Prioritized model and product findings ## Frequently asked questions ### What is text-to-speech development? Language design, pronunciation resources, voice evaluation, and product QA for natural synthesized speech. In practice, the work is bounded by a defined product or model decision, named audiences and locales, representative inputs, and acceptance criteria that can be reviewed. ### When does a team need text-to-speech development? A technically clear synthetic voice can still mispronounce names, flatten phrasing, mishandle numbers, or adopt a persona that feels wrong for the market. The useful starting point is the smallest representative flow that can expose the cause, impact, and ownership of the problem. ### What does a text-to-speech development engagement include? Design the voice behavior: Define audience, persona, dialect, register, content types, pronunciation policy, and quality criteria. Build language resources: Develop lexicons, normalization rules, phonetic guidance, exception handling, and evaluation sets. Evaluate in product: Assess intelligibility, naturalness, prosody, pronunciation, consistency, and task fitness with native listeners. ### What should we provide before text-to-speech development starts? The most useful inputs are target languages, dialects, and speaking contexts, audio or model access, speaker and consent requirements, acoustic conditions and devices, product tasks, scripts, prompts, and and quality thresholds. Admas can begin with a partial package, but missing context, rights, access, owners, or acceptance criteria will be made visible in the plan rather than treated as harmless assumptions. ### What does Admas deliver for text-to-speech development? Typical outputs include voice and language behavior specification, pronunciation and normalization resources, native-listener evaluation program, and prioritized model and product findings. Deliverables are adapted to the team that must use them, with decisions, evidence, limitations, owners, and next actions made explicit. ### How is the quality of text-to-speech development evaluated? Quality is measured against the real task and risk. Relevant evidence can include intelligibility and naturalness, task and recognition accuracy by cohort, pronunciation and prosody, speaker and acoustic coverage, latency, and accessibility and failure recovery. Sampling, severity rules, reviewers, adjudication, and pass or fail thresholds should be agreed before the result is used as a release decision. ### Can AI replace the human work in text-to-speech development? Speech models can draft transcripts, synthesize candidates, segment audio, and surface likely errors. Native listeners, phoneticians, voice specialists, conversation designers, and engineers are still needed to judge pronunciation, prosody, intelligibility, demographic coverage, and real interaction failures. The right allocation depends on consequence, content stability, available references, language coverage, reversibility, and the cost of a plausible but wrong result. ### How much does text-to-speech development cost? The estimate changes with recording or evaluation hours, languages, dialects, and speaker profiles, studio and equipment needs, transcription and annotation depth, model or integration work, and quality and consent controls. Pricing should distinguish setup and discovery, repeatable units, specialist or engineering time, independent review, management, and external costs. A low unit price is not comparable if it excludes the QA cycle or shifts rework back to the buyer. ## Related speech & voice ai services - [Speech data programs](https://admas.net/capabilities/speech/speech-data/index.md): Speaker, prompt, recording, transcription, and validation systems for multilingual speech development. - [Speech recognition evaluation](https://admas.net/capabilities/speech/speech-recognition/index.md): Language-aware ASR testing, error analysis, and improvement plans across speakers, accents, domains, and environments. - [Conversational voice-agent localization](https://admas.net/capabilities/speech/conversational-voice-agent-localization/index.md): End-to-end localization of spoken agent experiences, from recognition and dialogue policy to synthesized voice and repair. - [Speech quality evaluation](https://admas.net/capabilities/speech/speech-quality-evaluation/index.md): Perceptual and task-based evaluation for recognition, synthesis, translation, enhancement, and spoken dialogue systems. ## Start a project - [Build a project brief](https://admas.net/start-a-project/index.md?focus=speech): Tell Admas what you are building, which modalities and languages matter, and where progress is blocked.