Up against names like Microsoft, AT&T and Nuance, IVONA Earns Highest Marks and Emerges as TTS Accuracy Leader

Results of a new detailed text-to-speech industry study conducted by ASRNews concludes that IVONA Software, an award winning developer and provider of Text-to-Speech (TTS) technology, offers the most accurate text-to-speech functionality in the market today. IVONA ranked highest in 5 of the 7 categories designed to gauge accuracy, outperforming competitors such as Microsoft, Nuance, AT&T, Loquendo, Acapela Group, Cepstral, CereProc, NeoSpeech and SVOX.

Accuracy of commercial text-to-speech solutions 2011

ASRNews is an industry leading publication that focuses on speech technology and the text-to-speech marketplace. Its VIA TTS Accuracy Report is the most comprehensive and significant evaluation of companies operating in the TTS marketplace.

“Ten years ago, IVONA was founded on the mission to create the most natural sounding voices and a text-to-speech engine that delivers unmatched accuracy,” said Lukasz Osowski, CEO of IVONA. “Text-to-Speech functionality now becomes ’must have’ in mobile devices and applications. The study results validate our efforts and demonstrate that IVONA has become a TTS industry leader for developers and manufacturers who want to incorporate the most accurate and lifelike TTS option available.”

ASRNews’ VIA TTS Accuracy Study evaluated ten companies in the text-to-speech market, testing across seven different categories related to accuracy – Number Handling, Homograph Handling, Handling of Words of Foreign Origin, Acronym Handling, Abbreviation Handling, Name Handling and Address Handling. ASR News sent identical text to each of the engines, listened to each response and assigned a grade based on how closely the result resembled how a reasonably intelligent human being would speak the text. IVONA ranked number one in the following categories: Number Processing, Acronyms, Abbreviations, Names and Addresses.

According to the 2011 TTS Accuracy Study, summary results of which can be found at http://asrnews.com/TTS_acc_for website.pdf, IVONA’s overall score of 94.5% was nearly 22 points higher than the average of all companies tested.

“IVONA has clearly emerged as one of the most accurate TTS providers in the market today,” said Walt Tetschner, editor of ASR News and author of the study.

The quality of IVONA’s TTS engine and voices is apparent not only from the results of the ASR News study but also from the recent successes the company has enjoyed. Developers of desktop and mobile applications and Accessibility products are turning to IVONA to incorporate high quality voices which are now available in multiple languages and accents. Through the IVONA for Developers Portal, developers can easily deploy IVONA Voices either via the Speech Cloud or by embedding voices using a software development kit. IVONA also recently launched mobile app for the Android platform that allows users to switch out the stock voice and hear a high quality IVONA voice instead when using apps like Google Maps, Type and Speak, Moon Reader Pro.