Product category: Embedded Software and Operating Systems
News Release from: Babel Technologies | Subject: PocketBabil
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 1 July 2003
Text-to-speech software ports to Symbian
PocketBabil, the text-to-speech (TTS) solution for embedded environments, has now been ported to the Symbian environment
Specifically designed for the mobile devices market, the symbian operating system offers unlimited opportunities for application designers to move from customised platforms towards a standard and open platform that can now feature synthetic speech. The speech libraries are available on Nokia Series 60, Nokia Series 80 and Symbian ver7.
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 1 July 2003 at 8.00am (UK)
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With many years of experience in mobile devices, Symbian is now becoming a standard platform for smartphones.
Many mobile phone manufacturers have selected this operating system for their new generation of high-end cellular phones.
Symbian offers manufacturers the flexibility of an open platform allowing the continuous addition of new applications and features, and the robustness of a standard defined by the main players in this field.
The voice capability, which was already a main aspect of mobile phones, combined with the flexibility of Symbian, makes smartphones a multipurpose device ideal for speech-based applications.
While typical voice features like voice dialling, message reading etc used to run on specific hardware, new applications like content management, human interfacing, or rehabilitation applications, are now easily implemented on portable devices that run on Symbian.
Further reading
Text-to-speech engine aids talking gateways
Voxpilot has incorporated the BrightSpeech text to speech engine in its range of VoiceXML gateway products
Text to speech comes to wireless platform
Mobile devices will soon be able to read text messages aloud following an agreement between Babel Technologies and Texas Instruments
RTOS expands Freescale processor support
RTOS now supports Freescale i.MX27 multimedia applications processor, featuring an H.264 hardware codec for D1 high resolution video processing
PocketBabil is the embedded text-to-speech version of Babil, a high-quality multilingual TTS synthesiser, based on Babel's unique multiband resynthesis overlap add (MBROLA) concatenative algorithm.
This patented technology is available in 18 languages.
PocketBabil can produce any utterance in a given voice or language and features high segmental quality and fluidity of speech.
It is a software-only system that requires very few hardware resources in terms of memory and computational load.
This TTS solution enables extremely fast development of new voices and languages.
Commenting on the announcement, Vincent Fontaine, Babel Technologies' CEO said: "Babel's TTS technology is very well suited to fit the memory limitations of some of the existing smartphones.
Porting Babel's embedded text-to-speech to the Symbian environment, enables application designers or content providers to offer a complete product and application family on many devices, such as Symbian, WinCE, Linux etc with the same TTS-interface, look and feel".
PocketBabil is the ideal speech solution for portable devices and embedded equipment, and has been released in Arabic, Czech, Danish, Dutch (B and NL), Finnish, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazilian and Portuguese), Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, UK and US English.
The software currently runs on WinCE, Symbian, Linux environments or on platforms without OS.
PocketBabil is also available for Texas Instruments' high-performance, power-efficient OMAP wireless processing platform, which is delivering voice and multi-media enhanced applications for 2.5G and 3G wireless handsets and PDA's and other multimedia-enhanced devices.
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