As your Twitch career starts to blossom, you’ll start noticing how small, personal touches to your channel go a long way. From custom emojis and cool backgrounds to catchy text-to-speech (TTS) sub notifications, each and every little detail adds flavor to your growing internet brand. Today, we’re focusing on personalized, custom voices for your Twitch TTS messages.

Text to speech

But hold on a minute: what is TTS? You might be new to Twitch, but you must have encountered TTS in some form during your time online. And remember Microsoft Sam? Yup — that’s TTS, albeit in a more primitive form.

Essentially, TTS is a type of assistive technology that turns written text into audio (which is why we often call it “read-aloud tools”). Basically, you input your text into the software — or you turn on the plugin if you’re doing it all inside the browser — and you sit back and relax while the program reads it to you in real-time.

However, TTS tools are not just assistive technology nowadays. Sure, their primary function is still to enable those with reading difficulties and poor eyesight to convert text into audio files, but they can be used in e-learning or in content creation, for example, for voice effects, or for voiceovers in tutorials and explainer videos. Naturally, as you can use from our topic, they’ve also found their way into Twitch streams.

How to turn on text to speech for Twitch

Setting up text-to-speech voices for Twitch is pretty straightforward. All you have to do is:

1. Head over to Streamlabs
2. Go to the Alert Box section (you can see it on the dashboard on the left)
3. Select Donations
4. When the drop-down menu appears, click on the Text-to-Speech option and enable it

If you’re using Streamelements, the process is a bit different:

1. Go to Streamelements and click on My Overlays on the dashboard (you can see it on the left)
2. Select Create New Overlay
3. Click on Add Widget, then Alerts, then AlertBox
4. Choose the alert you want to set up 
5. Click on the Settings Wheel button to customize it
6. Scroll down to the TTS Settings section and enable TTS

Speechify’s text to speech services

Now that you’ve got TTS voices enabled, you might be wondering what the best way to make some custom ones is. Well, you can look around for cool APIs and bots in places such as GitHub, but your best bet is to find a high-quality TTS tool that makes use of sophisticated machine learning to bring speech synthesis to another level. One such tool is Speechify.

Speechify was originally designed to combat dyslexia, but it’s become a flexible tool that can turn everything into speech. 

Speechify works on iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac, but it comes as a Chrome extension, too, so you can make unique voices anywhere, even on the go. Sounds cool? Try Speechify yourself.

Resemble AI

Resemble AI is another great choice if you’re looking for lifelike, human voices for your Twitch notifications. What makes Resemble AI so cool is that it offers lots of customizable parameters, so you can make your custom TTS voices show a wide variety of emotions. Depending on the nature of your Twitch channel, you might dig some blends of authentic human voices with some more synthetic ones.

If you’re interested in giving it a go, hop over to the Resemble AI website and request a free demo (you can see the button in the upper right corner.) As for the actual pricing, well, if you do end up liking it, a more premium option will set you back $0.006 per second of content. 

Personalizing an AI voice

No matter what TTS tool you choose, your creativity will always be more important. If you’ve got a great idea, you can make do with little. On the contrary, if you lack vision, you won’t be able to attract viewers (and possible subscriptions), no matter how sophisticated speech technology you’ve got at your disposal. The same goes for actual streaming: tools like OBS are just tools, and it is your own creativity that will make your channel grow. 

So how do you personalize a TTS voice? Well, you can always hire voice actors or some sound engineers to do some voice cloning work for you, but we’re here because we want to give it a go ourselves.

The best way to make sure your AI voices reflect the content of your channel and your personality is to use your own voice as a sample. Since you’re streaming already, we can safely say that you aren’t that shy. So, simply record yourself and then use artificial intelligence to customize your voice until it’s the best text-to-speech voice you can imagine. Want to sound like an alien? Go right on. Want to sound like someone from New York? No one’s stopping you!

Available languages

Depending on the program you opt for, your available AI TTS voices will support one or more languages. Nowadays, most high-quality solutions feature dozens of languages besides English, although the quality might be lower if you’re looking for less-known languages.

Amazon Polly, Resemble AI, and Speechify, for example, all feature a wide array of languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, Hindi, and many more. In addition, Speechify can help you choose language varieties (e.g., American vs. British English) and local dialects, as well as allow you to customize them according to your liking. Want a female? No problem. Want something slower, deeper, and more sinister for your horror game streams? Speechify has got your back! 

FAQ

What is the difference between an AI and a TTS?

AI, or artificial intelligence, is pretty much the computer equivalent of our own intelligence. If an electronic device can solve problems and achieve its goal by completing certain tasks on its own, it’s got some kind of artificial intelligence. TTS, on the other hand, is a type of assistive technology based on artificial intelligence.