INNOETICS, a company specializing in text-to-speech synthesis, has launched the VoiceCrafts platform at the Interspeech 2016 Conference in San Francisco.
Powered by INNOETICS’s award-winning technology that delivers top-quality, near-natural synthetic speech, and its unique process for fast developing new voices, VoiceCrafts is a two-sided platform that allows any voice talent to create their own synthetic voices in just a few hours and any developer and app to use them through a simple API.
“VoiceCrafts makes it extremely easy and fast to create new, quality synthetic voices in an automated way,” says Dr. Aimilios Chalamandaris, CEO and co-founder of INNOETICS. “A few hours of recorded speech are enough to produce a natural-sounding synthetic voice that can then be used to liven up a whole range of next generation voice-enabled applications, such as conversational agents, speaking robots, the smart home, games, or even branded voice personas for enterprises.”
VoiceCrafts helps applications go well beyond what ready-made, uniform synthetics voices can offer. Each application can now have its own unique voice with a character and style that perfectly match its singular requirements.
With VoiceCrafts, the voice talents become an organic part of the process. Each time their synthetic voice is used in an application or a service, they get a share of the revenues. This provides a clear incentive for them to nurture their synthetic vocal alter ego and ensure it sounds perfect. The VoiceCrafts platform will integrate simple and intuitive tools for such a task.
“The voice building technology is now mature enough to take it out of the lab and into the hands of its stakeholders,” says Dr. Spyros Raptis, co-founder of INNOETICS and Director of Research at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing. “Empowering the voice talents to easily create their digital voice and directly monetize it through a rich set of speech services and APIs, can disrupt the speech synthesis business and change the rules of how synthetic voices are developed and used.”
VoiceCrafts’ goal is to become the host of the most extensive collection of synthetic voices in the world, covering an unprecedented range of languages, dialects and styles. But further to that, it aspires to be a vivid community of voice designers and developers that will rely on the platform to give a digital presence to their voices and link them to great new apps and services that urgently need them.
The VoiceCrafts platform is now in beta and until it is fully launched, all its services are free for non-commercial use.
