Facebook AI has built and deployed a real-time neural text-to-speech system on CPU servers, delivering industry-leading compute efficiency and human-level audio quality.

Previous systems typically rely on GPUs or other specialized hardware to generate high-quality speech in real time. We increased synthesizing speed by 160x using model system co-optimization techniques, enabling us to generate one second of audio in 500 milliseconds on CPU.

It’s deployed in Portal, our video-calling device and available for use across a range of other Facebook applications, from reading support for the visually impaired to virtual reality experiences. 


https://ai.facebook.com/blog/a-highly-efficient-real-time-text-to-speech-system-deployed-on-cpus/