What is Text-to-Speech? (TTS)
2 min read · Bolcho
The technology that turns the agent's text response into natural-sounding speech, giving the voice agent its voice.
Text-to-Speech explained
Text-to-speech is the 'mouth' of a voice agent. Quality is judged on naturalness (mean opinion score) and, critically for voice AI, on how fast the first audio starts playing — a slow TTS makes the agent feel laggy.
For India, the hard part is genuine Indic prosody: numbers, names, and Hinglish need to sound like a real person, not a translated robot. Bolcho streams Indic-first TTS (Sarvam Bulbul and others) so replies begin almost instantly.
Why it matters for voice AI in India
Understanding text-to-speech helps you build voice agents that actually work for Indian callers, genuine languages, low latency, and near-cost pricing. Bolcho is built around exactly these fundamentals.
See it in a real agent
Bolcho handles this for you end-to-end. Start a voice or chat agent free.
Frequently asked questions
What does Text-to-Speech mean?
The technology that turns the agent's text response into natural-sounding speech, giving the voice agent its voice.
Why does text-to-speech matter in voice AI?
For India, the hard part is genuine Indic prosody: numbers, names, and Hinglish need to sound like a real person, not a translated robot. Bolcho streams Indic-first TTS (Sarvam Bulbul and others) so replies begin almost instantly.