CereProc Announces Joint Development with Barcelona Media of a Bi-Lingual Catalan-Spanish Version of CereVoice

Edinburgh, Scotland, 21st February 2007

CereProc, the Scottish Edinburgh-based speech synthesis company, is pleased to announce the joint agreement with Barcelona Media to develop and release a bi-lingual version of the CereVoice designer speech synthesis system. CereVoice was launched at InterSpeech 2006 in Pittsburgh, as an advanced Text To Speech System, that offered emotional and characterful voices, at cost effective prices, to ensure that speech output can be used by all types of IT applications. This new variant of CereVoice will be able to produce both Catalan and Castilian speech output and will be marketed in Spain by Barcelona Media.

Chief Executive Officer Paul Welham explained: "This partnership is an excellent endorsement of CereProc's and the University Of Edinburgh's Centre for Speech Technology Research expertise in developing advanced synthetic speech solutions in any language. Since our commercial launch of CereVoice in December 2006, interest has been high and we have deployed the system with a number of major commercial organizations for evaluation and application development - our first commercial site went live with ReadSpeaker UK and Scottish Careers in December". Paul added: "The retail sales value of this agreement over the next few years will be at least six figures for both organisations and it is a clear indication that European companies can work together to exploit emerging research and the technologies produced".

Commenting for Barcelona Media - Marta Ysern, Head Of Business Innovation, said: "We see our collaboration and work with CereProc as an exciting opportunity to bring advanced speech synthesis to the Catalan market place and are 100% confident that this project will benefit numerous of our partners in all of Spain."

Dr Matthew Aylett, Chief Technology Officer of CereProc adds: "We're delighted to be working with Barcelona Media to add more languages to the CereVoice library. CereProc, as a company, feels very strongly about supporting commercial speech development and academic research across Europe and as such, we are happy to be offering CereVoice SDK to any research centre free of charge under license."

Commercial organisations who are interested in CereVoice for their applications should contact sales@cereproc.com.

All researchers in dialogue and/or interactive voice response (IVR) technology, or those interested in exploring new applications or adding speech synthesis to existing applications, should in the first instance email Dr Matthew Aylett at academic@cereproc.com

Commercial speech application developers should contact CereProc via email at info@cereproc.com

About CereProc

CereProc is a leading speech synthesis developer, with research and development facilities in Edinburgh and a commercial HQ in London.

CereProc has an advanced voice creation processes that reduces the time and cost needed to create new voices, while its CereScuer application enables the fast production of studio quality prompts that sounds real and have character.

CereProc directors and staff are all recognized as leaders in their field and the company works with partners such as the Centre for Speech Technology research at the University of Edinburgh, as well as with the Edinburgh-Stanford Link, a research technology fund that invests in speech and language developments at the University of Edinburgh and Stanford University, in California. CereProc is also working with Barcelona Media.

CereProc is a proud recipient of a Scottish Executive SMART grant, which was awarded to the company to continue researching and developing its pioneering technology.

For further media enquires, please contact Nick Wright at nick@cereproc.com or call 07949 525753.