
At CeBIT, one of the biggest Information Tech events in the world, a text-to-speech program named IVONA made quite a splash.
IVONA is made by IVO Software, and the demonstration at CeBIT had four voices in three different languages. “Ewa” and “Jacek” spoke fluent Polish, and “Carmen” was Romanian. One of the most popular speakers was “Jennifer” who spoke fluent US English.
This demonstration is still going online. If you go to www.ivona.com, you can have a chance to try IVONA in the aforementioned three languages. The best part is you can type in any text you want, and then have it spoken back to you. I tried typing a few select phrases on Jennifer, and I found that “she” was able to speak with some interesting tonal inflections. Read the rest of this entry »