Chant Expands Speech Options

Chant, an independent software vendor of speech technology tools, released SpeechKit 5, a new version of its component software that enables software programs and web pages to speak and respond to voice.

Now developers have the ability to add speech recognition and speech synthesis (text-to-speech) capabilities to desktop, Web, and mobile applications that can utilize the majority of available speech technologies. SpeechKit 5 provides a common application interface for Cepstral, IBM, Microsoft, and Nuance speech technologies.

"We were able to integrate text-to-speech in the Remote Access Bridge, a Java application at NC State University, with SpeechKit 5 in no time and run with more voices than we ever imagined," says Sina Bahram, president of Ad-Lib Technology, who also plans to take advantage of the new WinCE edition in Ad-Lib products. "In addition, we can easily build conversation based speech input/output .NET desktop and mobile applications with SpeechKit 5."

New key features and capabilities provided by SpeechKit 5 include:

Native speech API support for Cepstral, Nuance RealSpeak Solo, and Nuance VoCon 3200

WinCE Edition for Pocket PC 2003 and Windows Mobile 5 devices

Unified audio management for playback and recording independent of speech APIs and event handling for USB wireless headsets

Performance enhancements and queue management for synchronous and asynchronous requests