The text-to-speech effect is used on TikTok for many different reasons, one of them is to create funny videos by making the voice say specific words, or more importantly, it is used to make it accessible to users that are hard of hearing or blind.
The automated voice on the video app will sometimes pronounce words in a funny way which adds that extra comedic flare to people’s videos.
This TikTok creator @lucyedwardsblind shared a video about how happy she is with this new feature as it makes apps like TikTok so much more accessible to blind users.
How to do the text to speech on TikTok
Recently TikTok has added their own text-to-speech feature so users don’t have to use a separate app to create the audio.
What you have to do is type the text into a text box while editing the video then hold down and select “text-to-speech”.
It will then create audio from the text you type out, the feature will also read out emojis which can be funny as some of them have very random names.
Five funny TikTok examples
This girl used the text-to-speech feature to introduce her cute curly haired chinchilla.
There is a viral video going around of Nigella Lawson pronouncing microwave in a very peculiar way, so this TikTok user tested out the text to speech to see if it says it the same way as Nigella and it does.
Have we just been pronouncing it wrong this whole time?
The text-to-speech voice isn’t always the best at pronouncing people’s names but it is funny to see her try.
You can also stack the sounds on top of each other to make it sound like lots of people are talking over each other at once.
A lot of users have created videos that claim if you put ‘NO’ in capital letters the voice will read out nitrogen oxide instead of no, which could lead to some funny confusion.
The text-to-speech feature definitely isn’t perfect yet but that’s why we love it, and if it is helping make TikTok more accessible that’s even better.