Novauris and Pentax-NeoSpeech Partner

CHELTENHAM, England and MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - Novauris Technologies, a provider of core technology for voice-enabled access, and Pentax-NeoSpeech, a provider of text-to-speech technology for hand-held, desktop and network applications, today announced a strategic partnership in North America to promote each other's products and offer joint solutions that include Novauris's NovaSearch™ ASR and Pentax-NeoSpeech's VoiceText™ TTS.  The two companies are exhibiting together at Booth #311 at SpeechTEK, New York City, August 7-10, 2006. 

The collaboration will include joint marketing activities, demonstrations and customer trials.  Novauris will use VoiceText TTS for demonstrations requiring speech synthesis in North American English, and NeoSpeech will promote Novauris's technologies and solutions to its partners and customers who could benefit from large-scale voice access technology.  In addition, Novauris plans to introduce a customized version of the VoiceText TTS engine particularly suitable for certain large-scale voice access applications such as those including names and addresses.

Novauris's proprietary voice access technology, NovaSearch™, is well suited to a wide variety of tasks requiring speech input, ranging from access to hundreds of millions of items such as names and addresses to command-and-control applications needing an informal, highly flexible interface.  NovaSearch derives its power - power that allows direct access to 245 million items - mainly from its tight integration between speech recognition and database search.  In addition, the speech recognition in NovaSearch utilizes certain kinds of phonetic information, including aspects of syllable structure, that are normally ignored in conventional speech recognition.

NeoSpeech's VoiceText generates natural-sounding voices from text input and offers the same Text-to-Speech solution across hand-held, desktop, laptop and network applications, while supporting a broad range of industry standard operating systems.  Available in several languages, VoiceText can process any size or type of text, in applications ranging from telephone access to information or personal e-mail, to reading complete news stories, delivering the highest level of accuracy and quality.

About Novauris Technologies

Novauris develops core technology that lets people search and access millions of pieces of information easily by voice. Its core technology, NovaSearch™, is targeted at a specific class of voice-enabled applications, namely those that allow access to very large databases with just a single utterance. Visit www.novauris.com for more information on Novauris's technology, products and applications.  

About Pentax-NeoSpeech

Pentax-NeoSpeech is the fastest growing provider of speech technology and applications for the mobile, enterprise, entertainment and education markets. The company offers the highest quality Text-to-Speech engines available today for U.S. English, and all major Asian languages. Its VoiceText TTS engine is available in configurations and footprints for a wide range of embedded devices, desktop and network/server applications, making it the most flexible high-quality TTS solution on the market today. NeoSpeech is privately held, headquartered in Mountain View, California and backed by the resources of Voiceware Co., Ltd. of Korea and Pentax of Japan.

For More Information contact: 
June Ingles
Novauris Technologies Ltd
june.ingles@novauris.com