AT&T Expands Agreement with Wizzard
AT&T Intellectual Property has an agreement with Wizzard Software, and that agreement is now expanding to provide AT&T Natural Voices™ with licensing and support. AT&T Natural Voices™ is a text-to-speech software that has won awards for AT&T. The latest versions of AT&T Natural Voices™ will be supported by Wizzard as part of the agreement, across a range of platforms.
The Executive Director of Technology Licensing for AT&T Intellectual Property, Lisa McFarlin, said “AT&T Intellectual Property is focused on driving innovations that improve how we communicate, work and live.” She added, “In many cases, the company delivers these innovations directly, but we also recognize the value of making new capabilities available to the larger marketplace via licensing arrangements. Our new agreement with Wizzard is a great example of this approach, enabling any application developer to take advantage of the same state-of-the-art text-to-speech capabilities that power the hosted AT&T VoiceTone® Service.”
The General Manager of Wizzard Technology & Services Division, Bruce Phifer, said “The technology developed by AT&T Labs includes a highly flexible engine with language and voice-specific custom dictionaries that allows users to define the pronunciation of certain words and customize speaking rate, volume and voices, resulting in a very natural sounding synthetic speech system.” He added, “The combination of this extraordinary and scalable technology with Wizzard's low cost deployment licensing model is a win-win for developers, integrators and business clients, allowing them to produce substantial savings and efficiencies by automating applications or services.”