AT&T Labs Natural Voices

AT&T Labs today announced its first commercial product, the most human-sounding computer-speech system in the world. It is also the first that can recreate any voice.

AT&T Labs Natural Voices� Text-to-Speech has two parts. The first is a text-to-speech "engine," which turns written words into natural-sounding speech. The second includes a library of voices, and the ability to custom-develop a voice, perhaps duplicating a celebrity spokesperson for a business.

"We're changing the sound of business," said David C. Nagel, AT&T's chief technology officer and president of AT&T Labs. "We�re going after the lion's share of what will be a billion-dollar market for text-to-speech systems in five years.�

AT&T Labs Natural Voices Text-to-Speech is the first entry in a new portfolio of speech products, including those that will run on cellphones and other devices.

�We rated 15 different synthesized speech systems. AT&T Labs text-to-speech got the highest grade of all of them,� said David Offen, director of engineering for Benetech, a nonprofit organization that develops technology to meet social needs, such as online books for people with disabilities.

Customers for AT&T Labs Natural Voices Text-to-Speech include businesses that operate call centers, application service providers that create voice portals, and value-added resellers that offer speech services.

"We can do things no other company can do," said Nagel. "For example, we have the unique ability to enhance speech for specific applications, such as travel or reservation systems. If we know how a customer wants to apply a custom voice, we can ensure the application sounds natural and realistic."

The products announced today are:

AT&T Labs� Natural Voices Text-to-Speech engine, the most realistic, human-sounding synthetic speech system available;
AT&T Labs Natural Voice fonts, a library of voices to use when adding TTS to applications;
AT&T Labs Natural Voice icons, exclusive, custom-developed voices created by AT&T Labs in collaboration with customers.
From the first synthesized speech system in 1939 to today, AT&T Labs has long been the world�s speech technology pioneer, creating the highest quality and most robust speech systems available anywhere. AT&T Labs holds more than 150 patents in speech technologies. AT&T Labs' speech technologies (including automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech, and other customized speech-based solutions) make information readily available and accessible by voice.