IVONA Software Releases Truly Youth Text-to-Speech Voices

NEW YORK (SpeechTEK 2011) -- IVONA Software yesterday released two new text-to-speech truly Youth voices.

The youth market in the United States alone includes 60 million individuals between the ages of 5 and 19. Youth are strong adopters of mobile communications, e-Learning, digital publishing, and social networking, but currently have no voice of their own. Companies targeting dynamic communications to younger demographics have to make due with middle-aged TTS voices typically designed for telephone customer service solutions.

Nowhere is the underserved youth market more evident than for children with speech and sight disabilities who rely on TTS technology. In these cases, the TTS voice often becomes an extension of the individual. "Our feedback suggests that acceptance of the technology increases in the presence of high quality, natural sounding, age-matched voices," said Lukasz Osowski, CEO at IVONA. A statement echoed by Marc Mulcahy, co-founder of LevelStar, who said, "We selected the standard IVONA voices for their superior quality, and now with the addition of high quality youth voices, we expect to increase the demographic reach of our smart mobile devices."

Ivy, Salli and 26 more HQ TTS voices are available in Embedded/SpeechCloud SDK on a variety of platforms including x86, ARM, Windows, Android, Linux, Meego, and soon iOS. For system integrators, the new Youth Voices are on IVONA’s SpeechCloud service, or available on-premise using IVONA’s enterprise-class SpeechServer.

Youth voices will soon be available for purchase and free download at a number of e-commerce sites, including Android Market and ivona.com. Samples of the voices can be heard at http://www.ivona.com/voice_presentation.php