Its not often that a European start up (UK) starts making some noise in the USA espcially considering this is primarily based on using SMS. Spinvox is a realtively unique service (at least by US standards) which translates voicemail to text and then sends a message thru by SMS and email to your computer.
Lets face it when you are in a meeting no matter how boring it is there are few of us who would find it acceptable to take a call. However the send/receive button is allluringly present on a laptop usually faced towards us as we are obviously need it to make important notes on our collegues presentation.
Nice idea, but oddly I had never heard of Spinvox before and immediately decided i should take it out for a test spin only to find out it wasnt even available on the European continent. Apparantly I may have missed something here but I did not think that the Americans had really caught on to text messaging….

Since we have seen the first TTS integrated into various online campaigns last year it may not be bad to further explore creativity with speech synthesis for interactive campaigns.

When I saw this it was as if a few really big things came together for me. Here we have an example of a few things I know agencies have been trying to pull off for the past year. The combination text to speech, streaming flash video, avatars all put togetherat Northwestern University’s InfoLab. I am not going to dwell on the basic elemen,ts because if you have been reading my blog regularly you know where to get those parts and if I may add of significant better quality.

The real innovation here is the ability to dynamically generate a virtual newscast on a specific topic using a podcast broadcasting, transferring text data to speech.

Trendhunter adds an example for use: “Imagine the immediate potential of virtually collected, produced & packaged content for Second Life and other virtual social networks. Additionally, consumer use could lead to a complete redefinition of what it means to have a personal RSS Reader.”

Although I do not think we are waiting around for a new personal RSS reader I do think that the novelty effect would work well within an integrated media strategy.

Ms. Dewey: Taking cute too far by ZDNet’s Mitch Ratcliffe — If you haven’t seen Ms. Dewey, you will probably be hearing about her. She’s trying to kill the memory of Jeeves, who you formerly asked. She’s also a disaster as far as UI goes. Built in Flash, Ms. Dewey is an antropomorphized search page that features an actressMs. Dewey is only slightly more pleasant than Scuzz […

Nice guy who really went out of his way for me to educate me in TTS. ‘Ming’ at Guangming Software can probably get your projects running at a budget you will like but contact me for his details and I will introduce you. You still need an TTS engine of course.

Speak Aloud is a piece of text to speech (TTS) software. It can read text aloud naturally to you with the state of the art text-to-speech voices. Your eyes usually get tired when looking at the screen for a long time. You can let Speak Aloud read web pages, word document or any other highlight text (i.e., which you can select with mouse) to you with only pressing one hot key so that your eyes have a chance to rest. Save your eyesight and increase your productivity with Speak Aloud now!

Speak Aloud is also an advanced “text to audio” or “text to mp3″ software. It can convert text to speech files such as wav, mp3, wma, ogg etc easily. Especially it creates mp3 directly, no need to create wav file temporarily like any other text-to-speech programs. This will save your hard disk’s life greatly. You can convert news, jokes or articles to mp3 files and place them into your mp3 players, enjoy them when you are away from computer. Convert text to audio with Speak Aloud Now!

For a country where you half the population doesn’t speak a word of anything else than their mother tongue we were slightly surprised to learn that the best quality voice technology actually comes from a company based in Turin. After countless days of listening to wav files of disputably bad, average and good quality I quite literally couldn’t believe my ears when listening to some of these demo files. I haven’t quite heard text to speech of this quality, what is more it incorporates a library of expressions which can be used to naturalize a narrative.

Subjecting a programmer to the configuration is probably not such a good idea as it is still a process of trial and error to get the best sounding narrative but with the easy to use interface it is something most of us could handle.Loquendo is mostly used in IVR and (wait for it) video response systems!

A little excerpt from their last newsletter should inspire you!

This issue’s main article will introduce us to the emerging world of voice and video applications. IVRs are evolving into IVVR (Interactive Voice and Video Response) platforms and this creates new opportunities for VoiceXML and CCXML platforms, such as Loquendo’s VoxNauta platform.

I have been in contact with their charming Sales representative Massimilino Ferrero: or Max for short who works out of their office in Paris. Remember natural voices don’t work without an engine to run them so best do your homework or ask for a copy of mine;-)

http://www.loquendo.com : Sign up for their newsletter! Or contact me for details regarding your request.