[bookshare-discuss] Cepstral Breaks the 2 MB Voice Barrier: TinyText-to-Speech Voices Poised to Make Big Waves

"Shelley L. Rhodes" <juddysbuddy@xxxxxxxxxxxx> · Fri, 7 Jan 2005 09:49:43 -0500

Market Wire (Press Release)
Wednesday, January 05, 2005

Cepstral Breaks the 2 MB Voice Barrier: Tiny Text-to-Speech Voices Poised to 
Make Big Waves

PITTSBURGH, PA -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 01/05/2005 -- Cepstral LLC announced a 
new software release capable of producing fully general, unit selection 
Text-to-Speech (TTS) voices that are under two megabytes in size on the eve 
of the Consumer Electronics Show, CES, in Las Vegas.

Cepstral's new Swift 3.1 engine is the first high-quality human sounding 
voice based on unit selection technology to reach this threshold. "This puts 
high quality Text-to-Speech within reach for consumer electronics 
manufacturers enabling them to place features onboard such as talking 
e-mail, talking e-books, spoken reminders, or talking directions," said CEO 
and co-founder Kevin Lenzo.

By scaling high-quality voices down to 2 megabytes, they can potentially fit 
inside today's compact consumer electronics. This is important because the 
features afforded by TTS solve several real problems. For instance, there 
are safety concerns over portable devices being used while operating a 
vehicle. Text-to-Speech facilitates connectivity by offering a hands-free, 
eyes-free interface which in turn increases the utility and value of such 
devices.

Devices that help people manage dynamic data are especially well suited for 
TTS. A synthetic voice offers unconstrained content delivery so whether the 
device is an email tool, navigation tool, learning tool, or bio-metric tool, 
Cepstral's TTS engine can speak the results.

While tiny in size, these software voices can say anything. Currently, they 
are available only as male and female US English voices, but will soon be 
available in a half-dozen languages. Cepstral's voices are platform 
independent, running on Windows, WinCE, Linux, and Palm powered devices. The 
voices are scalable by design and can be tailored to meet specific size 
requirements anywhere from 2 MB and higher. "The bottom line is Swift 3.1 is 
the smallest high-quality, unit selection TTS engine on the market. Even at 
that, the Swift engine outperforms competing products that are hundreds of 
times its size in terms of platform independence, speed, and pronunciation 
accuracy," said Mr. Lenzo.

Cepstral was founded in 2000 by Dr. Alan W. Black and Kevin Lenzo, two 
renowned speech synthesis scientists from Carnegie Mellon University. The 
company specializes in producing high-quality, small-footprint TTS for the 
embedded electronics markets.

For more information about Text-to-Speech, or to schedule an interview with 
Kevin Lenzo, please call Craig Campbell at 412/432-0400 or 
craig@xxxxxxxxxxxx

Contact:
Craig Campbell
Cepstral, LLC
412/432-0400
craig@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.cepstral.com/
SOURCE:  Cepstral LLC

http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?release_id=78527

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