Automated speech processing specialist iSpeech has launched iSpeech for Publishers, a new set of tools and services that make it possible for content creators and aggregators to have articles or postings “read” to them by life-like voices. It also announced two participating partners. Pearson plc, parent company to Pearson Education, The Financial Times Group and The Penguin Group, is using the tools and platform to create audio books. Evernote, provider of one of the most popular note-taking and information aggregation utilities, has integrated iSpeech publisher into Evernote Clearly – a utility that makes the written content in a Web site easier to read (and now hear).
According to Yaron Oren, iSpeech’s COO, the company will continue to provide the full spectrum of automated speech processing capabilities. Along with partners, its roster already includes automated speech recognition (ASR), speech-to-text rendering (dictation/transcription), command and control and translation, in addition to the text-to-speech rendering that is at the base of the Publishing Platform. He sees the advancements iSpeech has made in making human-sounding text-to-speech to be an important differentiator and source of new business.
“We have some pretty innovative and ground breaking stuff coming in TTS,” Oren explains. In addition to the publishing platform, we expect to see more announcements around mobile apps (focusing attention on developers), automotive (including navigation, GPS and automotive entertainment) and the connected home.
When it comes to creating audio books, or what Oren calls “long-form TTS,” iSpeech’s approach has clear cost advantage over professional voice talent. Low-cost human-like TTS is also the key to creating a natural user interface for a wide variety of home and personal electronics.
As Oren explains (and Opus Research agrees), high-quality text-to-speech rendering is an important catalyst for creating the most natural interface to the proverbial Internet of Things.
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