Guideline of Microsoft Azure TTS

There are several facts you may need to know about Microsoft Azure Text-to-Speech.

1. Microsoft Azure Text-to-Speech offers 54 languages, 207 voices. Many of them are unique (not offered in AWS or Google).

2. Microsoft Azure offer a free tier: 5 million characters free per month for standard voice, and 0.5 million characters free per month for neural voice. After that, you will be charged $4 per 1M characters for standard voice, $16 per 1M characters for neural voice. This pricing model is absolutely the same as AWS and Google.

3. When you use the Japanese, Chinese, Korean language, one character is counted as two characters for billing. It's clarified here. Accordingly, in the CyberBukit TTS script, when a user chooses these three languages from Microsoft Azure, it will also be counted twice.

Know more about Microsoft Azure TTS? please see here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/text-to-speech/

Let's assume you already have an Azure account. Create it if you haven't. https://azure.microsoft.com/

Steps of configuration on Microsoft Azure

1. Sign in Azure: https://azure.microsoft.com/

2. After sign-in, Click 'Portal' at the right top (besides your email address).

3. Click 'Create a resource', type the word 'Speech' in the search input area, select 'Speech' (It's 'Speech', not 'Speech to Text').

4. Click 'Create', fill in the form:
Subscription: Free Trial or any other existing subscriptions in your account
Resource group: Create a new group with any name, or select an existing group
Location: In order to use all the voices, you can only choose one of the regions as follow:
-- Australia East
-- Canada Central
-- East US
-- Central India
-- South Central US
-- Southeast Asia
-- UK South
-- West Europe
-- West US 2
Name: any legal names
Pricing tier: Free F0 (When you get started, you can choose this tier, but when you use a lot and have lots of concurrent, you may need to choose 'Standard S0', which means you will be charged.)
Click 'Review + create'
Click 'Create'

5. Click 'Go to resource', click 'Click here to manage keys', click 'Show keys', you will see two keys, either of them is ready to use. This is the 'Subscription Key' that you need to copy to the CyberBukit TTS script.

This is the end of the configuration on Microsoft Azure.

Steps of configuration on CyberBukit TTS

Go to TTS Management -> TTS Configuration -> Microsoft Azure TTS Setting, paste the ''Subscription Key' you just created on Microsoft Azure. Select the region, the region should be consistent with the location you choose on Microsoft Azure.

This is the end of the configuration on CyberBukit TTS.

Next step, you need to sync the TTS resource from Microsoft Azure, then you will be ready to use it. See TTS Resource Management