2014 has been a busy year for CereProc and with only days to go before Christmas, here are some highlights:
First off the website has been freshened up and improved for our users. We love the new look and, more importantly, our users do too. Navigating the site and finding information has never been easier.
Good quality text to speech is a valuable resource for writing and editing, from books and plays to essays. Kendall Castor-Perry, a.k.a. 'TheFilterGuy', has written a useful piece on using CereProc's voices with the screenwriting program Final Draft, here.
Send us a tweet to tell us how you use TTS as part of your creative process!
The International Society for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (ISAAC) has chosen “Discovering Communication” as the theme for this year's International AAC Awareness Month.
August in Edinburgh is a wonderfully chaotic thing, with seven festivals and thousands of shows taking up every last potential performance space in the city for a month - the most famous of the seven of course being the Fringe. It was really only a matter of time until we decided to grab some of the limelight for ourselves. We're donning our top hat and tails and we're off to the opera, as CereProc's cast of voices take to the stage in Kevin Jones' 'Your Call...'.
Last week CereProc's CTO Chris Pidcock was featured on the BBC Radio 5 morning show 'Wake Up to Money'. Up for discussion was the rising importance of the technology sector in the Scottish economy, and Chris joined Mark Logan, the COO of our Edinburgh neighbours Skyscanner, to give an insider's perspective. Scotland’s' software and IT industries now employ 70,000 people and generate £4bn a year, representing around 5% of total Scottish gross domestic product (GDP).
Listen again here (skip to around 02:57:10)
Gaming has never been bigger business. Ever-more elaborate and sophisticated titles are being released all the time. Cutting-edge technologies are not only being deployed in game development, but are being researched and produced directly as a result of that development, as we've seen with innovations like Oculus Rift. CereProc has worked with large games studios around the world to bring our technology to a number of exciting projects, and we wanted to share with you a few of the ways in which text to speech can be used both in development, and to enhance the gaming experience.
CereProc partner with Swiss robotics group Devanthro to deliver speech synthesis for humanoid robots
CereProc have donated seven TTS voices in German, French, Spanish, Italian, Brasilian Portuguese, and US and Irish English to the Devanthro Society. Devanthro co-ordinates the research efforts around the development of 'anthropomimetic' robots - inspired by natural optimisations observed in the study of human biology and evolution. The voices will be used to speech-enable 'Roboy', Devanthro's flagship childlike android.
Congratulations to CereProc's Chief Scientific Officer Matthew Aylett, who received the People's Choice Best Talk Award at CHI 2014 in Toronto for his presentation: 'None of a CHInd: Relationship Counselling for HCI and Speech Technology.'
CereProc's flagship Scottish voice Stuart is the first point of contact for patients calling the new NHS telephone advice service in Scotland: 'NHS 111'.
At April's Digital Health conference (dHealth) in Stirling, industry insiders gathered to discuss a worrying fact: our current healthcare system will not be able to cope with our aging population. Talks focused on the provision of remote care for the elderly, cutting down on avoidable routine visits to the hospital and GP, and reducing the need for home visits by carers. This not only saves a small fortune in financial terms, it allows for more efficient use of staff time.
