Braile Based Cell Phone to Get Speech Interface

Babel-Infovox has announced that ALVA, specialized in the development and production of Braille displays and has successfully integrated and deployed Babel's PocketBabil Text-to-Speech engine into its new Mobile Phone Organizer 5500 (MPO 5500). Combining a GSM cell phone, organizer, and essential notetaker functionality, the Mobile Phone Organizer (MPO) is the first personal wireless device of its kind for visually impaired individuals. The MPO is a compact, easy to carry all-in-one device for mobile situations that can be used to make phone calls, send SMS messages, look up information and take notes. All functions including menus, contact information, SMS messages, services, and system information are made accessible in Braille and with speech.

ALVA has chosen Babel's PocketBabil in US & UK English, French, German, Dutch, Swedish and Norwegian for its low memory requirements and accuracy.

Dr. R.G.F. Erens, Manager R&D of Alva B.V. comments: "We have selected Babel's PocketBabil for the MPO 5500 because of a its good quality-performance record. Thereby a complete development toolkit and professional support is essential for a smooth integration of PocketBabil in our application." He continued "The state of the art technology used in the MPO, Microsoft Windows CE 4.1 and Intel Xscale processor was challenging for both ALVA R&D and Babel-Infovox R&D. Working closely together, the integration and optimalisation of PocketBabil for our application was achieved according to planning."

PocketBabil is the embedded text-to-speech version of Babil, a high-quality multi-lingual TTS synthesizer, based on Babel's unique Multi Band Resynthesis Overlap Add (MBROLA) concatenative algorithm. This patented technology is available in 18 languages. PocketBabil can produce any utterance in a given voice or language and features high segmental quality and fluidity of speech. It is a software only system that requires very few hardware resources in terms of memory and computational load. This TTS solution enables extremely fast development of new voices and languages."

Posted to the site on 7th October 2003