Slovene one of the 34 languages on Bing TTS map

Few days ago it came to my attention, that Bing has expanded their Text To Speach API with additional languages. I was surprised and very delighted to find that my native language (Slovene) is now one of 34 supported languages.

Why a surprise?

Slovene is with about 2.5 million speakers between top 5% of languages on the world today and it is on 179th place on this list (as you can read here in Slovene). So despite the fact that there are many more languages that are spoken much more often around the globe, I am delighted that it has been recognized and worth of implementing by Bing Cognitive services.

Who do we have to thank?

This is actually a good question. I do not want to pretend, that I know answer to this question, but let me speculate here a bit.  Continue reading “Slovene one of the 34 languages on Bing TTS map”