Hexia Releases Iceland's First Mobile Text-to-Speech Application

From: "BlindNews Mailing List" <BlindNews@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <BlindNews@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2007 23:49:03 -0400
Speech Technology Magazine
Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Hexia Releases Iceland's First Mobile Text-to-Speech Application

By Lauren Shopp 

Though its population tops slightly more than 300,000, Iceland's tech-saavy 
citizens have made for a country willing to adopt cutting-edge technologies at 
rates similar to the rest of Europe. And this month, Icelandic speech company 
Hexia launched the country's first text-to-speech (TTS) application for mobile 
phones. Called Ragga, the self-service application delivers synthesized speech 
to a user's mobile device.
  
Ragga is one of Hexia's most recent products, joining a coterie of the 
company's TTS services, such as a Web service interface that translates text 
from Web sites into synthesized speech. The company, which was founded in 2002, 
developed a VoiceXML 2.0-compliant application server, and then began building 
speech applications. The company's target market is the Icelandic population, 
and has had to overcome minor hurdles to push its technology into the 
mainstream.

Toti Steffansson, Hexia's CEO, says the quality of both ASR and TTS in Iceland 
was either not available or of poor quality, forcing the company to partner 
with other organizations. "Since we wanted and needed to be able to deploy our 
applications here, we were forced to create a consortium of enterprises, 
universities, and government agencies to rectify that situation," he says.

This consortium then partnered with Nuance Communications to create an ASR for 
the Icelandic language, which led to Ragga's release, he says. Ragga's primary 
user base consists of both dyslexics and busy professionals. While Steffansson 
says Hexia expected dyslexics to comprise its main user market, the company was 
surprised to see other demographics use Ragga. One such group, he says, is 
lawyers.

"(They) would like to download legal texts to their iPods and go jogging," he 
says. "That was not the target audience we had in mind."

The Icelandic language, which has changed little since Norse settlers arrived 
there in the 9th century, adapted well to TTS applications. Though complex, 
Steffansson states that Icelandic is easier to generate than English due to the 
language's variety of sounds. Hexia, he adds, is now working on a system that 
can handle gender and language idiosyncrasies. In addition, Hexia is also 
running tests with the country's Ministry of Education for an application it 
designed that allows dyslexic schoolchildren to enter text and have it read 
back them.

Currently, the Ragga service is provided on a "freemium" model, which is free 
for the disabled, but comes with a price for "enterprises and others we feel 
comfortable charging," Steffansson says.  Currently, Icelanders have responded 
well to the application, and he expects this growth to continue.

"The market (in Iceland) is small and technologically adept, making it easy to 
introduce and market services and see how they fare," he says. 


http://www.speechtechmag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=39885
BlindNews Mailing List
Subscribe: BlindNews-Request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "subscribe" as subject

Unsubscribe: BlindNews-Request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe" as subject

Moderator: BlindNews-Moderators@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

Archive: http://GeoffAndWen.com/blind

RSS: http://GeoffAndWen.com/BlindNewsRSS.asp

More information about RSS feeds will be published shortly.
Hexia Releases Iceland's First Mobile Text-to-Speech Application

Other related posts:
