Voice Elements Integrates Cepstral TTS

Inventive Labs—a provider of royalty-free .NET telephony application software—and Cepstral—a company specializing in text-to-speech (TTS)—today made Cepstral’s TTS software available on Voice Elements.

According to Laura Kennedy, director of communications at Inventive Labs, the move was made in response to the needs of the company’s clients.

“We knew we had customer demand for text-to-speech,” she says. “And we knew we had to do it."

And, Kennedy says, when the company was looking for TTS, Cepstral—which supports English, Spanish, French, German, and Italian with more than 30 voices—was the obvious choice.

“We had already integrated LumenVox speech recognition, but we needed an affordable option for text-to-speech,” she says. “Now anyone that develops using Voice Elements can instantly use text-to-speech.”

With the addition of Cepstral's server-grade TTS engine and voices to Voice Elements—a Dialogic-based telephony development tool for all .NET languages—solution providers can add TTS for dynamic prompts and information delivery for telephone-based solutions built on Voice Elements.

According to Kennedy, the addition of TTS to Voice Elements allows developers new to telephony to easily build speech applications.

“Essentially what we’re offering the market is an inexpensive and familiar programming environment,” she says.  “And you get text-to-speech and speech recognition on top of it.”

Kennedy says the TTS service—along with other services, like speech recognition—will be available at Inventive Labs’ online Telephony Bank. With the Telephony Bank, enterprises can make use of the company’s services via the Internet from any server anywhere in the world.

“People can try out text-to-speech and speech recognition 100 percent free by downloading the demo and then running it off our Telephony Bank,” she says. “So you don’t even need any hardware…So the future is cloud telephony.”

Additionally, Inventive Labs is offering companies the opportunity to sample its new TTS engine. “We have brand new sample programs in text-to-speech and speech recognition,” Kennedy says. “Those are available for download for free, so anyone can try it out.”