Text to speech vs speech to text: two technologies people mix up
Text to speech reads written text aloud; speech to text turns spoken audio into written words. They run in opposite directions, and choosing the wrong one costs weeks. Here is the difference, and where WeDispatch sits.
When someone sets out to add "voice" to a website, they often meet two phrases that look like cousins and leave with the wrong one. "Text to speech" and "speech to text" are close enough to be confused, and far enough apart that starting with the wrong tool wastes real time. They point in opposite directions. Working out which one your task needs is the first decision, before you compare prices or voices.
Opposite directions
Text to speech starts from written text and produces sound: you hand it an article, it hands you back an audio file people can listen to. Speech to text does the exact reverse: it starts from sound, a person speaking, and gives you the matching written words. That is what sits behind dictation, live captions, and meeting transcripts.
The mix-up comes from the fact that both deal with voice and text. But the direction of the arrow changes everything. A text to speech tool can do nothing with a recording: it does not transcribe. A speech to text tool reads nothing aloud: it does not generate a voice. These are two separate crafts, with different models, different constraints, and usually different companies behind them.
What each one is actually for
Speech to text is for when your raw material is spoken and you want text out of it: transcribing an interview, captioning a video you have already shot, dictating an email with no keyboard, indexing hours of podcast so you can search for a word. The work is done on sound that already exists, and the quality question is: did the machine hear correctly?
Text to speech is for when your raw material is written and you want sound out of it: giving a news article an audio version, letting someone listen to a how-to while they drive, making content reachable for a reader with low vision or dyslexia. The work is done on text, and the quality question is: does the machine read well? That is where the hard parts of a language live, the liaisons, the numbers, the acronyms, the proper nouns. We walk through that mechanism in the piece on how French text to speech works.
Where WeDispatch sits, and what it does not do
WeDispatch is a text to speech tool, and only that. You publish an article, we produce an audio version your readers play on the page. We do not transcribe: hand us a recording, an interview, a video, and we will not turn it into text. This is not a gap we plan to close one day; it is a different craft, and we would rather read French well than do two things halfway. Our stance, and what it covers, is laid out on the French text to speech page.
Saying this up front saves disappointment. We regularly get asked "can you transcribe my podcast?", and the honest answer is no. But if you have written articles and want them listenable, that is exactly our job, and the audio player drops onto your site without touching your content.
Why the distinction matters to a site owner
Three practical reasons. First, budget: the two technologies are priced differently, and a transcription quote has nothing in common with a narration quote. Comparing them is like comparing a translator and a printer. Second, the quality you expect: for recognition you measure a word error rate; for synthesis you listen for whether the voice stumbles on a tricky name or reads an ordinal as a plain number. The yardsticks do not overlap, and one borrowed from the other judges nothing.
Third, the data question differs. Speech to text handles recordings of people, sometimes identifiable by their voice; synthesis handles the text you send it. The questions to put to a vendor are not the same, even though in both cases you want to know where the material goes and how long it is kept.
A word on mixed projects
Some projects need both, in this order: transcribe a spoken interview, then have the written version read back by a synthetic voice for a different audience. That is perfectly legitimate, but it is two tools chained together, not one. Knowing the line exists saves you from hunting for a single tool that does everything, and from paying for two subscriptions to get a middling result everywhere.
If your need is to make your written pieces listenable, you are indeed after text to speech, and the rest of this blog is built for that. If your need is to turn speech into text, you are after speech to text, and you will not find it here, but at least you will know before you sign anything.
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