Ivona The Number One Text To Speech Translation

Posted on March 11, 2008 by Jamie Slaughter, with 8671 views

One of the largest and prestigious Information Technology events took place recently, in the form of CeBIT, where a particular program caught many peoples attention. The program is a text-to-speech program named IVONA. Produced by IVO Software, the demonstration which took place had four voices in three languages. Eva and Jacek spoke Polish, whilst Carmen spoke Romanian. The most popular speaker at the event was Jennifer who spoke with a distinct US English accent.

The demonstration can still be witnessed online, by visiting www.ivona.com, where the array of three different languages is available. You can type any text you wish into the text box and have the voice read out your message aloud. It's not like your average speech program, the character's voice actually sounds more fluent and believable.

There is still not complete fluency with the voices. Hesitation and mispronunciation are still minor problems which will be attempted to be ironed out over the next few years, but so far, from what we have seen and heard, this is the most sophisticated text-to-speech program yet.

The IVONA's main objectives and uses include presentations, announcement systems, audio books etc. It looks like creating an artificial voice is about to become commonplace in some systems and applications, once the fluency factor has been perfected.