Everything you need to know about text to speech on TikTok

While it's a fact that social networking is more popular than ever, it's equally true that a lot of these sites and services seem to disappear just as quickly as they arrived. One minute, MySpace is the most popular social media site on the planet. The next minute, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who even remembers it - most people are far more interested in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others.

Given its rise in popularity with younger generations in particular, TikTok does not seem to be one of those "fly by night" social networking services. With its focus on short-form visual content, it has already captured the attention of countless people out there and truly seems like it's here to stay.

One of the notable features of TikTok is that "TikTok Voice." That is to say, content creators will record a video and have a computerized text to speech TikTok voice provide narration for what you're about to see. It's a fun feature that uses text to speech (TTS) technology to add a new level of engagement to videos.

If you're wondering how to use text to speech on TikTok for yourself, the good news is that it's far easier than you might think. You just need to keep a few key things in mind to execute text to speech TikTok in the right way.

The History of the TikTok Text to Speech Voice Feature

The TikTok platform itself first launched all the way back in 2016 and, in the years since, has become popular in virtually all parts of the world. By 2020, TikTok had been downloaded more than two billion times, due in part to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when people were searching for any way to connect with other people, albeit remotely.

The text to speech TikTok functionality, dubbed Voiceover, first launched back in 2020. The goal was simple: it was to allow creators to add their own voices or computer generated ones to the content they were creating, thus adding an entirely new layer of immersion to the proceedings. Text to speech TikTok quickly became popular with most users and is a staple of the service to this day.

How to Change Text to Speech Voice on TikTok

Thankfully, the process of how to do text to speech on TikTok is actually quite straightforward. Text to speech TikTok begins by recording or uploading a video to your account, the same way you normally would.

Then, once you're in the editing stage, choose the option labeled "Aa" to add text to your TikTok. You can whatever type of text that you would like.

At that point, you can select the text to speech TikTok icon from the toolbar at the bottom of the screen. As of 2022, this will be the third icon from the left side of your smartphone's screen. However, keep in mind that the placement of icons and even the availability of features could change in future updates.

Once you have selected the text to speech TikTok icon, you'll be able to choose from a variety of TikTok's pre-installed voices. There is always the traditional "computer voice" that so many people use, but there are others that may sound more natural as well. Simply tap the icon for one of the choices to hear how it will sound when you finally publish your video.

Note that the text to speech TikTok voices also often have their own distinct accents. There are ones with traditional American accents, Australian accents and more. There is even one that sounds like Chewbacca from "Star Wars."

Once you're satisfied with your selection, simply tap the option labeled "Done" in the corner of the screen. At that point, you can upload your video and people will be able to see and hear what you've created in the exact way that you intended them to.

This is yet another instance where text to speech functionality in general has created a bold new experience on behalf of users. It's fun, it's exciting and it can take an already high-quality video and make it even better - not too dissimilar to the ways in which the technology can help improve things for personal users, students, professionals and others on a daily basis.

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Speechify and Text-to-Speech

While we're on the topic of text-to-speech, did you know that you can turn almost text into speech? Speechify is the #1 rated app in the app store, 2M+ Chrome Extension installs and is highly rated.

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