03/04/2012 - CereProc partners with Voice Business to give the Austrian Postal Service a voice
Global leader in text to speech technology, CereProc, has created the world's first Austrian text to speech (TTS) voice together with Telecommunications Research Centre Vienna (FTW), partnering with Voice Business to deliver an advanced track and trace system for the Austrian Mail Service.
Working with FTW for two years as part of the Viennese Sociolect and Dialect Synthesis (VSDS) project, CereProc created the Austrian text to speech voice - named Leopold - from voice recordings and clippings, before being deployed and subsequently integrated - in partnership with Voice Business - for use across the country.
Marking a successful partnership and effective project delivery, Dr. Matthew Aylett, CTO of CereProc explained:
"We're very proud of the Leopold voice, and the way in which it is being used in such an innovative and purposeful employment to such fantastic reception. With all partners involved in the project offering their respective expertise and resources efficiently and with enthusiasm, it has been a real pleasure to work alongside each team to deliver the final track and trace system on time, and on budget."
Being one of the first of its kind and handling more than 30,000 calls each month, CereProc's Leopold voice technology - delivered by Voice Business, under prime contractors Telekom Austria and Siemens - is being used to effectively 'answer' telephone calls from customers seeking to track and trace their parcels throughout the Austrian postal network.
"As is the case among all strong cultural groups, people clearly enjoy the engaging nature of experiencing natural and characterful native voices in automated communication systems. We're looking forward to exploring further sectors across the Austrian market, while examining further potential text to speech voice creation projects across the globe. It gives us great satisfaction to provide the less spoken languages - but no less important - of the world with a cost effective and natural TTS voice!" Aylett continued.
A highly effective IVR deployment of CereProc's multichannel TTS cServer and MRCP Connector to service the over 8 million strong population, the innovative system processes identification numbers to compose a summary of all status messages which is then delivered to the caller as a dynamic summary using the natural sounding Austrian voice, Leopold.
Commenting on the creation of the voice, Michael Pucher, Senior Researcher at the Telecommunications Research Centre Vienna, Austria, said:
"When we decided to commercialize our research results we were happy to have CereProc as an industrial partner with its competence in voice building and software development. Together we built the first high-quality Austrian German synthetic voice, which is now successfully used for reading websites, in spoken dialog systems, and for screen readers. "
CereProc's collaboration with FTW and Voice Business has strengthened the text to speech expert’s position at the forefront of global TTS technology industry as a full service key partner for voice creation, deployment and integration of innovative and viable speech synthesis solutions for commercial purposes.
The voice can be heard in the live demo bar at the top of this page and is available for download from the CereProc store for both Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OSX.