Babel Releases BrightSpeech

Babel Technologies, a developer of speech processing technologies, has announced BrightSpeech, its next-generation Text-to-Speech solution (TTS), which has been developed with a library of pre-recorded 'human speech units'.

Babel claims the human speech units enable BrightSpeech to offer 'improved naturalness'. The Windows-based solution is aimed at software developers who want to use synthetic speech as an information carrier, or for those integrating synthetic speech into their products or services.

Babel anticipates that typical applications for BrightSpeech include telecoms servers and multimedia applications, such as portals, interactive voice response systems, unified messaging (including e-mail reading), educational software and interactive kiosks. During Q1 2003, Babel also plans to adapt BrightSpeech for mobile platform applications to provide the same human sounding voice for automotive and PDA applications. The software will initially be released in French, German and Spanish versions, with US English and Swedish following during Q1 2003.

Babel has increased its development efforts to progressively cover the 18 languages it currently supports with its existing and established TTS solution, Babil. The full range of languages which Babel will support with BrightSpeech will include: US English, UK English, Spanish, German, French, Dutch (NL), Dutch (BE), Brazilian Portuguese, European Portuguese, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, Turkish, Czech and Arabic.

Vincent Fontaine, CEO for Babel Technologies commented: "This new release represents a breakthrough for TTS technology, setting new standards for synthetic speech in terms of naturalness and voice quality. Our development team has also placed a great deal of emphasis on the intonation module, which has significantly improved the intelligibility and listening comfort of the speech output."

Fontaine added: "We have had extremely positive feedback from our market test trials and are focussing development efforts to swiftly expand upon the three languages we will initially deliver to the market." Babel Technologies will also be delivering BrightSpeech for RISC based mobile platforms, such as StrongARM, SH3, SH4 and MIPS. Here it will be used mainly for automotive and PDA applications. The first of these products will be available from Q2 2003 onwards.