RealSpeak
Nuance (formerly ScanSoft/SpeechWorks Solutions) RealSpeak – Features and Benefits
The age of the electronic voice is nearly over! Nuance’s RealSpeak Text-to-Speech solution reads and converts computer text into the most natural sounding and intelligible voice available.
A RealSpeak voice takes two months or more to record, with the ‘model’ voice completing arduous studio sessions, reading the same material different ways, in different tones, and ending up with a 2MB data store of component sounds, or ‘fragments’, of human speech.
The basic units of the RealSpeak engine are not limited to diphones. The system uses a whole range of speech segments such as diphones, syllables, and also larger phoneme sequences. This mixture of voice segments and in-depth linguistic knowledge provides intelligent and human sounding pronunciation of variable text input.
Natural Sounding
- Offers highly intelligible voices based on samples of actual speech
- Prosody models provide natural sounding intonation for sentences and phrases
Intelligent
- An intelligent e-mail pre-processor correctly interprets e-mail; excludes footers, filters headers, expands abbreviations and acronyms, and correctly reads URLs, e-mail addresses and emoticons
- Advanced linguistic processing analyses and provides the correct pronunciation for homographs, or words that can be pronounced differently depending on their context, such as “read” and “record”
- Unlimited vocabulary results from pronunciations generated by phonetic rule, rather than looked up in a dictionary or table
Flexible
- Exception dictionaries are easily created to customise specific words
- A proper names database is included for the most frequent surnames and first names
- Control sequences are available to specify pauses, emphasis etc.
Minimum System Requirements
- 266 MHz processor
- 64 MB RAM
Online Demonstration
Note: Only certain specific voices are included with each application that uses the RealSpeak voice engine – for example, only the RealSpeak US English (female) and RealSpeak UK English (female) voices are included with Kurzweil 3000 version 8.
Only the application manufacturers can choose which voice(s) to install/include with their application.
Click here for an online demonstration of RealSpeak voices in various languages and regions.