AT&T Labs Natural Voices Announces Support for German Language in Multilingual TTS Engine

FLORHAM PARK, NJ -- AT&T Labs announced German language support in its Natural Voices Text-to-Speech (TTS) Engine. The new language is immediately available and operates on platforms from large servers to the desktop to meet the needs of developers and businesses of all sizes. The German text-to-speech languages or voice fonts (named Reiner and Klara) join other voices in the AT&T Labs Natural Voices family of speech products including Rosa, who speaks Spanish, and Mike, Crystal, Rich and Claire, who all speak English. According to AT&T, the advantage of using Natural Voices text-to-speech engine is its ability to simultaneously support English, Spanish, and German for dialogue or multi-language applications efficiently and effectively. For example, a company offering voice portal services can support multiple languages for international customers with one AT&T Natural Voices TTS engine and multiple foreign-language voice fonts (all on the same hardware platform). Additionally, the AT&T Labs Natural Voices TTS engine can expand to accommodate new languages as they become available. "By combining German with AT&T Labs' natural sounding speech technology, businesses now have an advanced speech-processing tool to reach a large and growing German population within the United States and abroad," said Lex McCusker, general manager of AT&T Labs' Natural Voices software. "This high-quality speech engine provides a fast and efficient solution for companies looking to incorporate German-language capabilities into new services or desktop applications." Although no applications are bundled with the software, the AT&T Labs Natural Voices TTS engine is compliant and works immediately with Microsoft's Speech Application Programming Interface (SAPI 5.0 and 5.1). The software development kit for all three editions of the engine (Server, Server-Lite and Desktop) enables developers to create SAPI-compliant applications or use the C++ Application Programming Interfaces to create TTS-enabled applications. Information for this story was gathered from AT&T Labs Natural Voices.