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Presenter(s)
John Rye
Dolphin Oceanic Ltd.
Email: john.rye@dolphinoceanic.com
Web: www.dolphinuk.co.uk
This paper reviews some recent developments in Text to Speech synthesis at Dolphin. It will be of interest to those concerned with improving the experience, at work, and at home, for people who use speech as part of their primary access tool. The Orpheus version 2.01, speech synthesizer includes the ability to speak with more natural sounding, concatenative voices, alongside the familiar synthetic voices; Orpheus is unique in including both types of voice in the same engine. Concatenative voices are suitable for many applications beyond use by blind and visually impaired computer users. They are often deemed easier to listen to, especially by intermittent users of speech. The synthetic voices on the other hand, use little memory, are responsive and are intelligible at the fast talking rates often used by blind and visually impaired computer users. Their use can aid efficiency in many tasks for instance, in response to the demand for speech on portable devices; Dolphin has ported the Orpheus version 2.0 to Windows CE. Orpheus for Windows CE is now available from Dolphin as an SDK, and will be demonstrated on industry standard PDAs running Pocket PC 2002 and 2003 talking applications.
About the company
Dolphin Oceanic Ltd., one of the Dolphin group of companies, develops screen access technology for blind and visually impaired computer users. With its proven expertise in screen reading with speech and Braille, screen magnification and products in many languages, Dolphin oceanic is constantly developing new technologies.
Dolphin Oceanic develops well-designed, stable and reliable software, which can be installed with confidence on home computers, laptops, PDAs and school, university or corporate networks. Dolphin's powerful software tools are easy-to-use thanks to intelligent design, and popular with home users, students and professionals the world over.
Dolphin's goal is to enable people with a visual impairment to gain full access to industry standard computer systems. Dolphin's clients enjoy the freedom to use all kinds of software and surf the Internet, without having to resort to specially adapted system configurations. This automatic approach also encourages real integration as Dolphin clients can use the same computer systems as their sighted co-workers, family and friends without worry.
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