dot-font: Voice Fonts Speak Volumes
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dot-font was a collection of short articles written by editor and typographer John D. Barry (the former editor and publisher of the typographic journal U&lc) for CreativePro. If you’d like to read more from this series, click here.
Eventually, John gathered a selection of these articles into two books, dot-font: Talking About Design and dot-font: Talking About Fonts, which are available free to download here. You can find more from John at his website, https://johndberry.com.
This week I encountered a very peculiar bit of terminology. Under the headline “Computerized Voices May Sound Familiar,” the “San Francisco Chronicle” published an article from the Associated Press about AT&T Natural Voices, a technology that AT&T Labs Research has developed to turn written text into spoken words. The goal is machine-made voices that sound natural—even uniquely identifiable. “Alongside the text-to-voice software,” says the article, “which comes with three English-language voices—one female and two male—AT&T can create custom synthesized voices, or ‘fonts,’ that can closely imitate a particular human’s voice.”
Fonts?
I can see the logic by which someone at AT&T Labs (or more likely in AT&T’s marketing department) decided to call these synthesized voices fonts. It says a lot about the influence of digital typesetting on the ordinary, everyday world that the word font has become so ubiquitous that a major corporation would use it without hesitation. Twenty years ago, most Americans, if they had heard the term at all, would think of it only in phrases like “baptismal font” and “the font [or fount] of all wisdom.”
Which isn’t even the same word, actually. Despite the British/American disagreement over whether to spell font with or without a u, the common font that holds water takes its name from the same source as fountain. The type “font,” on the other hand, comes from the medieval French fondre, to pour or melt, which is exactly what a type founder would do in order to make metal type. A foundry is a place where molten metal is poured into a mold and cast into predetermined shapes.
But today, thanks to the dominance of digital typesetting, we can speak of a type-design business such as Font Bureau or House Industries or Porchez Typofonderie as a “digital type foundry,” without the slightest worry about molten pixels spilling out of the ladle and burning holes in the floor.
It’s in the Digital Air
Digital fonts have become so easy to produce that they’re now commodities. While we haven’t quite reached the point Neville Brody predicted a few years ago, where we stroll into the supermarket and pick a new font off the shelf along with the groceries, we can pick up fonts on the fly at any number of Web sites. You can even have your handwriting turned into a font; it may not be the most usable typeface in the world, but it will be recognizably your own.
And digital fonts are software programs, not physical objects. In the hands of a talented programmer they can have “properties” and “behavior,” just like any other software “object.” This could mean anything from appearing different in different contexts (think hinting for the screen) to changing each time they’re used (like the RandomFonts designed some years ago by LettError, which never print quite the same way twice).
So the idea of attaching a font to an identity—a corporate identity, for instance—could theoretically mean that every time the public sees your trademark message, it would appear in the same style of lettering. Today we have to enforce this with complicated graphic-identity systems and unique logos, but in the future it could be built into the message itself.
Aural Identity Systems?
Which leads us back to today, and another intriguing paragraph buried in the middle of the AP story about AT&T Natural Voices.
“Despite the expense, AT&T believes companies will pay to create a distinct voice as a corporate identity to be used on an answering system or in advertisements.”
In other words, a corporate font. Just as today some wealthy publications and large corporations pay a type designer to design a unique family of typefaces that nobody else will be able to use, tomorrow those same clients may by looking for digital-voice foundries to design custom corporate voices. (In the type business, usually this restriction on use only lasts for a certain period of time—a couple of years, say—after which the type designer is able to sell the font to the public. Will this same pattern hold true for the licensing of corporate voice fonts?)
AT&T’s Web site describes AT&T Labs’ Natural Voices fonts as “a library of voice ‘fonts’ offering companies the ability to select voice sounds, tones, accents and inflections that best represent their needs. In addition to the male and female U.S. English voices currently supplied with the SDK, another male voice with unique characteristics is available now. Several more voices, both male and female, will be available in the very near future, generating a very robust library of voice ‘personalities.'” Although the article doesn’t mention it, AT&T’s Web site makes a distinction between voice “fonts” and voice “icons.” The fonts are generally available; the “icons” are unique, custom-made versions—the true corporate font, if you will. As AT&T describes the process, “A voice talent selected by the customer is used to generate live recordings, after which the AT&T Labs TTS Team applies their magic.”
It’s a little like hiring, say, announcer Don Pardoe to handle all the verbal presentations of your company. Only in this case, you could synthesize the voice and maybe tweak it to your own taste. No live actor need speak any of those words again. Just as a graphic designer can use a calligraphic typeface to get a reasonable approximation of handwritten calligraphy for a movie title on a poster, an audio designer will be able to choose the appropriate voice font and have it say anything the client pleases. (“Play it again, Vanya.”)
Riffing
I’ve enjoyed letting my mind run wild with the concept of voice fonts, and the associations that the word brings up. Will we have serif and sans serif voices? Bold and extralight? Compressed and extended? Fatface? Cursive? Will voice designers create special versions of their fonts for use at small sizes (at a whisper, say, or in that rapid-fire muttering that ends so many radio ads with the aural equivalent of “the fine print”)?
Perhaps in some future world of online avatars, we will not only look however we’d like in other people’s virtual worlds, but also speak with custom voices and have word balloons appear simultaneously over our virtual heads—the complete coordination of voice fonts and visual fonts.
Let the fun begin.
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