11/05/2017 CereProc releases a high quality Swedish text to speech voice in collaboration with the Swedish Government Agency MTM

CereProc, in partnership with the Swedish Agency for Accessible Media (MTM) , is proud to announce the release of the new text to speech voice (‘Ylva’) that will help thousands of users across Sweden.

MTM will use the voice primarily to produce a wide variety of ‘talking’ books and newspapers for university students and people with accessibility needs. Currently, about thousand university books are synthesised every year and 120 Swedish newspapers are delivered to users on a daily basis. The new voice is also available to download from the CereProc website for personal and commercial use.

Back in 2016, CereProc beat tough competition to win the prestigious tender to give Sweden a new voice. CereProc’s CEO Paul Welham comments: “I believe the reason CereProc stands out from the crowd is our focus on innovation and backing that up with business acumen. It can be difficult for an SME from Scotland to compete in the global arena but we’re working hard every day to show it can be done. We’re grateful that MTM decided to place their trust in us and we could deliver a voice that their users are very happy with.”

Christina Tånnander from MTM comments: “We called for a collaboration with a TTS company where MTM could be part of the development process in terms of testing and quality assurance. The ability to control the voices via standard formats such as SSML is of immense importance to us, as well as the possibility to further collaborations to enhance the voices. CereProc did meet all these requirements.

User feedback has so far been positive. People like the voices and think they are highly intelligible and of a very high quality.”