646 — Rhetorical develops Spanish voice for the American market

May 22, 2003 | Conteúdos Em Ingles

Rhetorical, a UK developer of text to speech technology has created a new voice capable of seamlessly switching between Spanish and US English. Rhetorical’s Americas Spanish rVoice recognises when to use Spanish pronunciation and when to use English pronunciation from a simple text input. For example, in a sentence like ‘Central Bank es un banco central’ the first occurrence of ‘central’ will be read as an English word and the second one as a Spanish word.

The Americas Spanish voice also automatically reads out the numbers and abbreviations in addresses in the right language. For example, an address written as ‘7th Ave’ will be spoken as ‘Seventh Avenue’, and ‘C/ Juan XX’ comes out as ‘Calle Juan Veinte.’ The Americas Spanish voice is optimised for addresses in North America, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Mexico and Spain.

With this TTS software, Rhetorical aims also at exploring the South American Market . Spanish is the second most widely spoken language in the US. Many areas in the US have names or streets which are of Spanish descent. There are around one and a half million Spanish speakers in California alone but also in places like Texas where the US borders Mexico.

Filipe Samora
2003-05-22

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