ScanSoft and Infinity Telecom Partner
PEABODY, Mass. - ScanSoft Inc. (Nasdaq: SSFT) announced a partnership with Infinity Telecom to develop embedded speech applications for mobile devices. Infinity has integrated ScanSoft's embedded text-to-speech technologies into its mobile speech solutions to develop a suite of applications including SMS-to-voice, e-mail reading and talking dictionaries for mobile handset manufacturers.
According to Gartner, competition in the mobile handset market will intensify in 2004, as sales exceed half a billion units. ScanSoft and Infinity Telecom are developing a suite of embedded speech applications that can help mobile handset manufacturers differentiate their product offerings in this increasingly competitive market. As the first application in this offering, ScanSoft and Infinity Telecom recently introduced a solution to enable talking dictionary functionality on mobile phones. Talking dictionaries are very popular tools in the Asia Pacific region, particularly for students who are eager to learn correct pronunciation of English words as well as understand their meaning. A user types in the English word and the correct pronunciation is read aloud in a native U.S. English voice. Using ScanSoft's RealSpeak™ Word solution, handset manufacturers can now add dictionary functionality to their mobile devices. Introduced in February 2004, RealSpeak Word provides a natural-sounding English voice that can support a 60,000-word vocabulary in just 3MB of storage.