Text-to-speech (TTS) technology converts written text into natural-sounding spoken audio. Neural TTS revolution: Deep learning replaced robotic concatenative synthesis with natural prosody, emotion, and expressiveness. Models learn speech patterns from massive voice datasets. Leading technologies: Tacotron 2 + WaveGlow (attention-based), FastSpeech 2 (parallel generation), VITS (end-to-end), Vall-E (voice cloning from 3s sample), Tortoise TTS (high quality, slow). Commercial services: ElevenLabs (leading voice cloning, multilingual), Play.ht, Amazon Polly, Google Cloud TTS, Azure Cognitive Services. Open source: Bark (Suno AI, highly expressive with laughter/emotion), StyleTTS 2 (style transfer), Coqui TTS. Voice cloning ethics: Creates deepfake concerns, consent required for cloning real voices, platforms adding watermarking and detection. Use cases: Audiobook narration, accessibility, video voiceovers, virtual assistants, gaming NPCs. Quality factors: Training data quality, prosody handling, emotion control, multilingual support.