Rubidium Releases Mandarin Chinese ASR and TTS

Rubidium, a provider of embedded speech processing technologies, today released a new automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) engine for Mandarin Chinese.

Although Rubidium has already implemented Mandarin Voice User Interface (VUI) in the past, the new release also allows the following:

• The seamless integration of ASR, TTS and pre-recorded playback into a single engine;
• The support of a standard recognition vocabulary;
• A comprehensive support of the Mandarin character set in both UTF-8 and Unicode; and
• The integration of the new language into its multilingual software package for Bluetooth-enabled products based on the CSR Bluecore5 and CSR8670 chips.

The slim computational resources (power, MIPS and memory consumption) allow the creation of Chinese speech interfaces in many consumer products, such as mobile phones, hands free car-kits, automotive multimedia, and infotainment and smart TV.

"The Chinese government has joined many nations around the world in passing legislation that prohibits the use of mobile devices while driving. The new legislation, coupled with China's growing economy, has created an exceptional potential for utilizing our technology," said Shlomo Peller, CEO and Founder of Rubidium, in a statement. "China-based chip and consumer device manufacturers are capitalizing on the unique opportunities created by our Mandarin release."

Rubidium has been supplying its voice trigger functionality to the market for more than a decade. Mandarin Chinese voice trigger functionality will give truly hands-free control to users in China. "Rubidium saw an opportunity developing, so we took special care to design a product that would respond to the specific needs of the Chinese market. This includes voice trigger and in addition, the combined use of Chinese and English," Peller said in the statement.