audio tag

An audio tag is an instruction embedded in text that tells a text-to-speech program 'say it this way here.' Think of stage directions in a play script that actors refer to. Just as a script note like (laughing) or (whispering) in parentheses cues an actor to laugh or lower their voice at that point, an audio tag planted between sentences tells the voice-generating program to add laughter or trail off at that spot.

The key point is that this tag is not an actual audible sound file but a text-based instruction. The sentence a person reads stays the same, and simply adding the tag changes the emotion, pace, and intonation of the resulting speech. That's why, when developers build chatbots or voice services, how they place tags within sentences can make the same words sound stiff or warm.

Articles explain that it was "designed to insert audio tags into sentences during the text-to-speech process to finely control details like emotion, intonation, and speaking speed." A common misunderstanding is mistaking audio tags for separate audio files or sound effects, but they are actually text-based instructions embedded within the text itself.

When writing a sentence to send to a speech synthesis API, try inserting short markers in parentheses indicating emotion or tone before and after the part you want to emphasize. For example, construct a sentence like '(laughing) Really? (whispering) That's a secret,' then feed it directly into a text-to-speech service and compare how the sound differs with and without the tags.