Aculab Unveils Latest TTS Software Featuring Variants in Voice Styles

PANAMA CITY, FL, MILTON KEYNES, UK, MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA and MUNICH, GERMANY -- Aculab, a provider of enabling technology for the communications market, has unveiled the latest version of its text-to-speech (TTS) software, which now features five languages, including Latin American Spanish, as well as variants in voice styles. Providing a number of pre-configured versions for each voice, Aculab's new release of TTS allows developers to choose from up to 10 stylistic variants. These include a range of formal, semi formal and casual options for both male and female voices. Voice styles can provide useful alternatives, not only to the degree of formality but to attitudes or tones of voice, enabling different personalities to be portrayed. Aculab's "international" accent is also made widely available in this version of TTS. According to Aculab, this has been carefully designed to give a clearer output, making it wholly acceptable and intelligible to all English speaking customers. Intonation and duration modelling in Aculab TTS takes into account the structure of the words and phrases to be spoken and gives the appropriate emphasis, producing intelligible natural rhythmic speech. Aculab TTS incorporates a model of pitch range and variation, which ensures that the intonation is clear and meaningful. It also adds the right amount of natural variation, avoiding the monotonous and erratic extremes of other TTS systems. "Because Aculab's text-to-speech software can be downloaded under a cost free license from our Web site for use with our Prosody digital signal processing (DSP) resource cards, it provides developers with exceptional value for money," says Chris Gravett, sales and marketing director of Aculab. "As Prosody is so flexible, it can be used to provide an audio channel for TTS output as well as other DSP functions like recording and conferencing." "Using TTS and Prosody, email and SMS messages can be retrieved and heard by phoning an integrated messaging service," explains Chris Gravett. "This type of service is perfect for people on the move who need immediate access to their email. Aculab's TTS software uses client/server architecture, with an email pre-processor and a lexicon customization tool. It is available with Windows NT4.0/2000 and Linux operating systems support. New languages available for field trial include Italian and Brazilian Portuguese.