Text-to-Speech
Turning written text into spoken audio. Modern voices are convincing enough to be used for real narration, which raises its own questions about disclosure.
Related terms
Query Fan-Out
When an assistant turns one question into several searches behind the scenes, then combines what it finds. It means your page can be pulled into an answer about a question you never targeted.
Speakable Schema
Markup identifying the parts of a page suitable to be read aloud by a voice assistant. Narrow in application, but it removes the guesswork about which sentence answers the question.
Tool Use
An AI reaching outside itself to do something it cannot do alone: run a search, do arithmetic reliably, read a live page. Nearly every useful assistant depends on it.
Author Authority
The weight given to content because of who wrote it. Advice attributed to a named person with a real background is treated very differently from advice signed by a company or by nobody.
Search Intent
What somebody actually wants when they type a query: to learn, to compare, to buy, or to find a specific site. Matching it matters more than matching the words.
Transformer
The model architecture behind almost every modern AI system, introduced in 2017. Its trick is paying attention to how every word in a passage relates to every other, which is what made fluent machine writing possible.