IVONA text-to-speech leads world rankings of speech quality

IVONA text-to-speech has recently been awarded top grades for its quality at the international Blizzard Challenge Competition held in Edinburgh, Scotland. Our-text-to-speech has also won recognition at the SpeechTEK Labs Conference in New York, US.

Top scientific institutions and research centres of world's largest technology corporations competed in Blizzard Challenge, such as: IBM, Microsoft, Nokia, Toshiba, Nagoya Institute of Technology of Japan, University of Science and Technology of China. Competitors in this year's edition received identical recordings of a professional voice artist to develop its artificial, text-to-speech counterpart. The text-to-speech system thus created had to read a few hundred sentences bristling with complicated language phenomena. The texts read by the competing text-to-speech systems were evaluated by a few hundred experts and Internet users. The results of the competition were announced on 4 September at the scientific conference held at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. IVONA text-to-speech has been awarded top grades in the competition already before, in 2006 and 2007 (it wasn't among the competing systems in 2008).

We are pleased with the increasing popularity of IVONA text-to-speech. There are already a few dozen thousand people using it for film voice-over, reading the Internet content and books. - says Łukasz Osowski, President of the Board of IVO Software. - We are not resting on our laurels following this year's Blizzard Challenge. Soon, we are planning to launch completely new British voices that are bound to revolutionise the market. High grades we've been awarded, as compared to technology tycoons, go on to prove that we don't need to be afraid of competing worldwide.

A few days earlier (24 to 26 August) IVONA also featured at lab workshops accompanying the conference SpeechTEK 2009 in New York, US. It has won broad recognition among the participants there. Our continued presence at key industry events and subsequent collaboration projects with international companies are the outcomes of our progressing expansion in English-speaking markets.