2021 Highlights – a year at CereProc in a nutshell!

2021 was an eventful year for many reasons. This blog post will focalise on the key achievements that have taken place within CereProc over the course of the past year, from the creation of new language models and voices to participating in the building of the HARU social robot companion. Here you will find a highlight reel of CereProc’s wonderful projects.

Perhaps the most exciting client projects this year could be said to have been building a clone of Dr Peter Scott Morgan’s own voice using language adaptation techniques to give him the ability to speak Mandarin, Japanese and German for the first time in his life and without prior knowledge of these languages; providing the Honda Research social robot HARU with an expressive voice by adding six different emotional genres (conversational, happy, sarcastic and whiny to name a few) for better empathetic engagement and to charm its users; and finally the creation of a Geordie accent voice for British comedian Lee Ridley which he debuted on Christmas Eve on the ITV special, Christmas Comedy Club. Lee’s new voice has allowed him to regain part of his cultural identity and converse with friends and family in his native accent.

Alongside the release of the world’s first on mobile device (Android and iOS) neural Text-to-Speech (TTS) system – CereWave AI V6.1, CereProc also worked on developing a number of new voices for major companies such as NLB in Oslo creating the first Norwegian TTS voices in the Bokmål and Nynorsk dialectics and building Italian child voices. In addition, Mandarin Chinese, Russian and Lithuanian voices are set to launch in early 2022, so keep an eye out!

Finally, CereProc’s commercial team have taken part in a number of online events to showcase our outstanding and inspiring technology, such as the 2021 Project Voice Conference and a Webinar hosted by Bradley Metrock showcasing our innovative technology. If you were not able to attend, do not fret! You are still able to listen to our team discuss CereProc’s innovative text to speech technology and key customer successes by following this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/uywwyYgsZ6uVI0zQLPMQCQWnLAadxbLgiTTa8s...