A natural voice for a computer (July/Aug 2000)

After a positive look at Voice Xpress, Lernout & Hauspie’s voice to text software, speech technology reappears at www.ananova.com where the world’s first virtual newsreader, ‘Ananova’ uses L&H’s RealSpeak technology to turn text into a natural sounding voice and matches it to animation based on 3D games-style techniques. at this Press Association site Ananova will deliver live breaking news, sport and entertainment from around the UK.

By all reports, the creation process is a lengthy one – graphics aside, achieving a real voice is said to take a month or so and require the subject to read the same words in various tones to create a store of ‘phonemes’ that are assembled in real time to achieve a real voice. RealSpeak currently runs in US English, French, Korean, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Swedish. By the end this year L&H plans to add Japanese, Mandarin and Norwegian. A neat ‘type-and-hear’ demo can be tried at www.lhsl.com, while the nicely rendered ‘Ananova’ will do some news and sport at ‘her’ website. Ananova Limited - previously PA New Media who provide material for the UK's highest traffic web sites including Freeserve, AOL, Yahoo!, Cellnet and Excite.