Turin, Italy (7/31/2008) - Loquendo, leading innovator in speech technologies worldwide, releases Loquendo TTS 7.5, now also supporting the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) latest release 5.1, and a streamlined and remodelled TTS Director ? Loquendo's prompt-authoring suite.
Thanks to a series of significant developments in the TTS speech engine, and an extension of the Java API set, a whole range of innovative and highly useful new features can now be controlled with Loquendo TTS Director - the complete authoring tool for creating, testing and refining voice prompts.
Among the many new features is the User-Driven Unit Selection Tool: if the reading of a prompt is not exactly how you want it, the User-Driven Unit Selection Tool enables the user to perform an alternative acoustic unit selection from the speech database - so giving you the maximum flexibility for the smoothest pronunciation and intonation possible.
The Reading Style feature, on the other hand, allows prompt designers, with just one click of the mouse, to activate/deactivate a wide range of parameters simultaneously. By commanding the TTS engine to follow a predefined or user-defined reading style, many parameters can be adjusted at the same time, such as: reading of SMS abbreviations according to the SMS lexicon; insertion of pauses at phrase boundaries; spelling out of each word; interpret/ignore secondary stress in SAMPA transcriptions; reading of all numbers as dates/phone numbers, and many more.
The Reading Style feature gives users more control, simplifying the creation of complex, lengthy prompts and guaranteeing they are read out just as you want them.
The Voice Flavour feature enables you to listen back to your prompts exactly as your customers will hear them, with audio compression, frequency range and sampling rate exactly as for the device for which your application was designed.
While providing many new control features, TTS Director has also been revamped with a new look-and-feel, including: colour-coded control tags and SSML tags; cut&paste and wordwrap options; SSML syntax validation to rapidly identify mark-up errors; support for client-server architecture, allowing you to remotely access and control your TTS engine from one or more PCs, using TTS Director.
In addition, Loquendo TTS 7.5 has undergone significant upgrading at a phonetic level for various languages, with a reworking of the allophonic transcription rules and of the phonetic labelling of the speech database.
SAMPA alphabet interpretation has also been revised, in agreement with the major map vendors? conventions.
The next generation suite of authoring tools for speech synthesis will be presented at SpeechTEK 2008 in NY, August 18-20 at the New York Marriott Marquis, Booth #509. And to find out more about all the benefits of TTS Director, participants in the event can take part in SpeechTEK Labs on Tuesday, August 10:45 a.m. ? 12:30 p.m., Tools for Speech Application (Davide Bonardo, Loquendo). And last, but by no means least, don't miss Loquendo's Speeches at SpeechTEK.
Loquendo TTS is now available in 23 languages with 57 personas. Currently available languages include U.S. and U.K. English, Castilian, Catalan, Galician and Valencian, American Spanish, Mexican, Chilean and Argentinean Spanish, Italian, German, Esperanto, French, Dutch, Greek, Mandarin Chinese, Brazilian, Portuguese, Swedish, Turkish, Canadian French, Polish in both male and female voices.
|