Featured in Trouw: How AI Learns to Read Articles Aloud

I was featured in Trouw, one of the Netherlands’ leading newspapers, explaining how AI systems can read text aloud with speech synthesis.

The piece outlines the journey from Stephen Hawking’s robotic “Perfect Paul” voice to today’s nearly human-like synthetic speech.

The Three-Step Process

I broke down how modern text-to-speech works:

Text Analysis → Acoustic Modeling → Audio Generation

One big challenge is teaching AI the subtleties of Dutch pronunciation - from the different vowel sounds to regional variations of the hard ‘g’.

The Paradox of Perfection

One insight I shared: perfect synthetic speech actually sounds fake. “Real” human speech needs those spontaneous hesitations and irregular breathing patterns that make it believable.

It’s always exciting to share our research with the broader public and help people understand the complex technology behind the voices they hear every day.

Read the full article (in Dutch): Hoe leert een AI-stem om artikelen voor te lezen?