Text-to-Speech and Voice Cloning Course - How Humans Speak

Explore the fundamental biology and physics behind human speech production in this 46-minute lecture that serves as essential groundwork for understanding AI speech synthesis systems. Discover how thoughts transform into sound waves through the complete speech pipeline, from cognitive language processing to physical articulation. Learn about phonemes and the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) as the building blocks of speech, then delve into the source-filter model that explains how vocal folds generate sound and how the vocal tract shapes it into recognizable speech. Examine the role of formants and resonance in creating distinct vowel sounds, understand how prosody adds rhythm and melody to speech, and explore what makes each voice unique through timbre analysis. Investigate coarticulation effects that show why speech context matters, and discover how emotion and expressivity add layers of complexity to human communication. Connect these biological processes to modern AI systems by understanding how neural vocoders and voice cloning models replicate human speech production mechanisms. Gain insight into why creating realistic text-to-speech remains challenging for machines and how the source-filter model directly informs contemporary AI speech generation approaches. Access accompanying course materials through the GitHub repository and join community discussions to deepen your understanding of this foundational knowledge for advanced speech synthesis work.