Text to Speech

When you embed a Copilot Studio agent on a webpage using DirectLine and the Bot Framework Web Chat control, it works great — but it’s text only. What if your agent could speak its responses out loud? In this post, I’ll show you how to intercept bot responses from the Web Chat store middleware and pass them to a text-to-speech engine so your agent speaks every reply in the browser. The pattern works with any TTS provider — the browser’s built-in Web Speech API, Azure Speech Services, ElevenLabs, or anything else. ...

Yesterday, Microsoft announced three brand new MAI models — MAI-Voice-1, MAI-Image-2, and MAI-Transcribe-1 — available through Microsoft Foundry and explorable via Copilot Labs. These are Microsoft’s own in-house AI models, purpose-built for voice, image, and transcription tasks, and they’re genuinely impressive. Naturally, I had to build something with them. What is “Once Upon a Prompt”? Once Upon a Prompt is a personalised AI bedtime story generator. You tell it about your kids — their names, ages, and a few fun details — pick a story theme, and it creates a fully narrated, multi-voice story with a custom illustration. All generated in seconds. ...