- Delivering natural-sounding, highly intelligible TTS middleware
- Providing a longer-lasting, cost-effective replacement to manual voice recording
March 31, 2004 - Cambridge, UK - The quality and intelligibility of embedded TTS technology will be improved significantly thanks to a new solution being pioneered by Toshiba Research Europe Limited.
The Toshiba TTS system uses the company’s patented training and pronunciation processes to select automatically the best way of phrasing millions of words and sentences, and delivers more natural sounding speech as a result. As well as handling any written text, the Toshiba solution is able to articulate large amounts of information in a compact manner thanks to its advanced phonetic input functionality.
Officially launched in Q3 2004, the Toshiba TTS middleware currently covers UK and US English, French and German with more languages set to follow. For added functionality, it provides both female and male voices for each language and is able to support more than one dialect at the same time – for example, enabling a piece of German text to be translated for an English audience.
Toshiba TTS is ideal for in-car navigation, PDA, PC and games devices, and virtually any other system where manual voice recording is currently employed. It can be used for a range of applications – from reading out a driver’s emails or navigation instructions to communicating reminders from your TV or DVD. With its natural sound, broad vocabulary and breadth of languages, the Toshiba solution represents a cost-effective alternative to manual voice recording, which has to be constantly updated and rerecorded with each minor change.
Toshiba is also able to draw on strengths from across the entire organisation to offer its customers a complete embedded solution. This comprises not only speech middleware (both Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and TTS) but also the requisite chip technology and processors, and worldwide customer support. This latest development builds on Toshiba’s leadership in the TTS market. Toshiba has already shipped TTS middleware to almost all car navigation vendors in Japan and its technology is used in numerous computing and entertainment products worldwide.
“Natural sound and clear enunciation are the watchwords for a successful Text-to-Speech system. With this latest version of our TTS engine, we’ve reached new standards in both fields, producing a solution that is more consistent and consumer-friendly than any other on the market today,” says Dr. Kate Knill, Group Leader of the Speech Technology Group at Toshiba’s Cambridge Research Laboratory (CRL). “What’s more, its enormous vocabulary and multilingual skills enable automotive, computing, telecoms and entertainment manufacturers to reach a broader audience, more cost-effectively than is possible with limited, instantly outdated recorded voice systems.”
The Toshiba TTS’ pronunciation unit can also be shared by the company’s ASR engine, reducing memory requirements and development costs in combined solutions. The core technology behind the TTS, including the porting of prototype systems into pre-embedded form, was developed by Toshiba’s Corporate Research & Development Centre, based in Kawasaki, Japan. The development and optimisation of the European and US language components and the development of the new pronunciation unit was conducted by the CRL team.
For more information about Toshiba, please visit www.toshiba-europe.com/research/
Over Toshiba
Toshiba Information Systems Benelux is een dochteronderneming van de Computer Systems Division van Toshiba Europe GmbH, een leverancier van portable computers. Naast notebooks levert de organisatie mobiele en draadloze Pocket PC’s, accessoires en mobiele server oplossingen voor de zakelijke en consumentenmarkt. Voor meer informatie zie www.computers.toshiba.nl
De Computer Systems Division van Toshiba streeft bij de ontwikkeling van haar geavanceerde notebooks, PDA’s en servers naar de ultieme vrijheid van werken. Toshiba is toonaangevend fabrikant van mobiele producten uitgerust met WiFi- en Bluetooth-connectiviteit; dé wereldstandaarden voor draadloze systemen op kantoor, thuis en onderweg.
Het moederbedrijf, Toshiba Corporation ontwikkelt informatie- en communicatiesystemen, elektronische componenten en consumentenelektronica voor uiteenlopende markten. Het bedrijf heeft een positie verworven als innovator op het gebied van geavanceerde componenten, producten en systemen. Toshiba heeft wereldwijd 166.000 medewerkers en de jaaromzet bedraagt ruim 47 miljard US$ (2003).