Fonix Corporation, a leading provider of natural-user interface technology for wireless and mobile devices, Internet and telephony systems, and vehicle telematics — today announced the release of iSpeak 3.0 for Windows, the latest version of Fonix’s popular speech interface software. The $49.95 PC application reads any text file aloud in a natural-sounding male or female voice using snippets of actual voice samples.
iSpeak enables anyone to listen as their computer reads email, digital books, documents, and websites in a natural, human-sounding voice. The number of playback voices has increased from two to 14, giving users an array of new choices to suit their listening style.
Fonix iSpeak 3.0 also includes the following new features:
- Support for Microsoft Word integration, “reading” from within Word itself.
- Integration with Microsoft Outlook 2000, Microsoft Outlook Express, and America Online to listen to email on demand.
- New Drag and Speak icon to make listening to any file easier. iSpeak 3.0 will automatically launch and read the files aloud.
- Enhanced user interface. Allows users to more easily access the application’s play list.
- Divide large documents into several smaller tracks for exporting iSpeak files in MP3 format.
Fonix, a leading provider of voice solutions for wireless devices, also has Speak This, a web-based reader that can automatically “speak” your web page (and translate into different languages), iSpeak for the PocketPC, a PocketPC “talker” as well as Voice Dial, a speech recognizing technology.
Translation tools include Handheld translators like MobiLearn, PocketPC software with phrase books. Tap on one for a canned response in a variety of languages.
IBM’s ViaVoice Translator for the iPaq immediately translates anything you write from English to French, Italian, German and Spanish and from each of these languages back to English.
Ectaco Universal Translator UT-103 allows users to actually speak into the UT-103 ($249) and have their phrases translated into Spanish, German, or French via a built-in speaker. Put one in the park (along with your free wireless kiosk).
Microsoft’s Natural Language Processing Group is exploring Real-time Machine Translation from English into Spanish, with real-time responses to Spanish queries. Text to speech and speech to text software may be utilized in handhelds and kiosks. That’s what SOAP does. Voice in - graphics out.
Free e-books are available from Microsoft and University of Virginia’s Electronic Text Center which has more than 10,000 publicly accessible texts in thirteen languages. There are 2,000 + e-books available (in English) for MS Reader & Palm Reader.
How much would it cost to have the world’s greatest literature translated and “spoken” in multiple languages, either as streaming audio, MP-3 download (perhaps to a CF chip) or even plain vanilla CDs? Just about zero.
Here’s more Dailywireless stories on Natural Language Input and Voice Interfaces.
IBM’s Developerworks and Wireless Zone have a wonderful treasure chest of information on Voice and XML while their Research demos include automatic Machine Translation (below) that allow you to translate a webpage of your choice into a variety of languages including Korean and Chinese. Truly awesome!
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Try our interface to the online demo. Type a URL into the field and select the language you want the site to be translated into. The Web page will appear with all of the HTML text not appearing in a graphic translated into the selected language.
For external World Wide Web URLs only. Japanese translation uses King of Translation system. Read an article and disclaimer about the demo on developerWorks.
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