Product category: Embedded Software and Operating Systems
News Release from: ScanSoft United Kingdom | Subject: RealSpeak Word 1.0
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 19 February 2004

Talking of dictionaries

RealSpeak Word 1.0 is a new speech solution for electronic talking dictionaries

RealSpeak Word provides a highly natural-sounding English voice that supports vocabularies up to ten times larger than competing products with no memory increase required. Electronic talking dictionaries are very popular tools in the Asia Pacific Region, particularly for students who are eager to learn and improve their pronunciation and intonation of English words and idioms.

With an electronic dictionary, a user types in the English word and it is read aloud in a native US English voice.

In 2003, approximately eight million talking dictionaries were sold throughout the region.

"ScanSoft has applied its expertise in embedded speech technologies to deliver a relevant, timely solution that is expected to enhance the marketability of electronic dictionaries and reduce the cost of production for manufacturers", said Audrey William, Industry Manager (Enterprise Communications) of Frost and Sullivan.

"The appeal of this solution is likely to improve ScanSoft's market position in the industry, while at the same time expand their existing customer base".

RealSpeak Word uses a new approach to achieve high quality synthesis for predefined words and idioms.

This patent-pending technique is based on a coding-by-synthesis model rather than the traditional method of recording the audio data and then using a speech coder.

This traditional method requires significantly more storage memory, which raises the bill of materials for the product - or the total cost of product.

For example, using coding-by-synthesis, RealSpeak Word delivers a 60,000-word vocabulary in just 3Mbyte of storage.

Competitive solutions would require about four times the memory to deliver an equivalent number of words.

Additionally, RealSpeak Word can support vocabularies up to 100,000 words and more with little memory increase.

RealSpeak Word will be accompanied with powerful tools to reduce the manufacturers' time to market.

As a result, manufacturers benefit from a flexible system with a high quality voice and low memory footprint reducing the total cost to produce the talking dictionary.

"RealSpeak Word uses the coding-by-synthesis model providing manufacturers with numerous advantages in voice quality, wordlist flexibility and memory usage over traditional products that use pre-recorded audio", said GK Chen, Regional Sales Director for ScanSoft.

"As the electronic dictionary market becomes increasingly competitive, manufacturers can enhance their offerings to customers without increasing the bill of materials".

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