Rhetorical and Telisma form Partnership

PARIS, FRANCE and EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND - Rhetorical and Telisma, European providers of Text-to-Speech (TTS) technology and speech recognition respectively, have announced that they are joining forces in a technical and commercial alliance to offer the speech resources required for deploying user friendly voice services for contact centers and business users across Europe. "Essentially too many companies try to offer too many products at once; with a complex technology such as speech this can mean that performance and quality are sacrificed as the resources to constantly improve the core offering are not available," said Rhetorical CEO Marc Moens. "With a growing industry like this it is important that these core technologies are constantly improved and companies with different specialisations work together." The partnership will also see both companies share their linguistic technology. Telisma and Rhetorical will work together at improving the break down of language both phonetically and lexically "Although we appear to be working at different ends of the scale, Telisma in receiving speech and Rhetorical in speech synthesising the ways in which we work can be surprisingly similar," said Telisma CEO Laurent Balaine. "We both have to break down a language to understand the thousands of ways people can pronounce the same word. Essentially we are working with the building blocks of language, the tiny elements which make up each sound, letter, word and sentence. By enabling closer understanding of these building blocks we will not only improve our products but uncover the secrets of spoken language.