CereProc Partners with Hanson Robotics

CereProc has been collaborating with Hanson Robotics on a project based on Sophia, Hanson Robotics' human-like robot. Sophia, using CerePro's singing TTS system, recently sang a duet with a human on NBC's "The Tonight Show."

This collaborative AI project gives Sophia an enhanced AI-based synthetic voice, now with the ability to deliver more dramatic and entertaining performances in real time, while also enabling her to express humor, suspense, excitement, and the odd cheeky remark.

The AI-based machine learning technology developed by CereProc uses Voice Puppetry to allow human speakers to use their own voices to finely control any synthetic voice.

"I'm really proud of our creative collaboration between Hanson Robotics and CereProc. CereProc is a great company, well-managed, with a track record of great innovations in synthetic speech. Their technology gives our robots excellent speech capabilities; the best we have found. This latest collaboration is key as it allows Hanson Robotics to create live human-like expressive performances from our robots," said David Hanson, CEO, chairman, and chief creative officer of Hanson Robotics, in a statement. "For healthcare applications, for real-world social robotics, such as customer service agents, or collaborative robots, having the ability to run autonomously with text-to-speech will be transformative and make the whole experience even more life-like."

"This is a game-changing moment for the speech synthesis industry and the billion-dollar text-to-speech market. The limitations of the technology that have challenged the major vendors for years have been overcome," said Paul Welham, CEO of CereProc, in a statement.