David Braben appointment
Joins board of outfit developing dynamic synthesized speech for games.
11th August 2009. Cambridge, UK. Phonetic Arts, www.phonetic-arts.com the creator of innovative new technology that generates rich, expressive dynamic speech in computer games today announced the appointment of award winning, game industry legend David Braben to its board of directors.
Paul Taylor, Chief Executive Officer of Phonetic Arts said, "We're delighted to have David on the team. His expertise, hands on approach and knowledge of the industry will be of enormous benefit. The fact that he has never before taken a non-exec role of itself speaks volumes."
David Braben, Chairman of Frontier and newly appointed non-executive director of Phonetic Arts added, "Having spent a lot of time with the guys at Phonetic Arts I'm really excited at the potential offered by their technology. In-game dialogue has come a long way but there's still so much it can accomplish. I believe that the team at Phonetic Arts has a compelling product that will add new depth to games."
Phonetic Arts' goal is to revolutionise the computer games industry by allowing computer games to generate natural speech dynamically. Many computer games currently make extensive use of voice actors; but it is important to realise though that these are just plain recordings of their voices. As a key element in all modern games is to capture and recreate realism, the inability of a game to generate dynamic speech is a severe restriction. Phonetic Arts has developed a unique technical solution to this problem. The centre-piece of the technology comprises a speech synthesis engine and voice development environment, which allows games to speak with any voice and say any sentence. The speech produced is completely natural and will for the first time enable games developers to generate voice content which matches the high quality of other parts of the games.
Phonetic Arts was founded in 2006 by Paul Taylor, Ian Hodson and Anthony Tomlinson. Paul has a pedigree in speech having been the director of the world renowned Centre for Speech Technology Research in Edinburgh. During this time he was at the forefront of many of the advances in speech synthesis. In 2000, he co-founded Rhetorical Systems and four successful years in which the rVoice synthesizer lead the world in synthetic speech quality, Rhetorical was sold to speech recognition giant Nuance in 2004. Paul then took up a visiting lecturer position at Cambridge and took this opportunity to finish his comprehensive text book based on his years of research ('Text-to-Speech Synthesis).
Phonetic Arts is exhibiting at Gamescom in Cologne on the 19th, 20th & 21st August. Booth No: I-010 Hall 4. Contact: steve.tyson@phonetic-arts.com for a private demonstration of our exciting new cross platform speech technology.
Media enquiries to: Alison Beasley, Lincoln Beasley PR. T: +44 1608 645756 M: +44 (0) 7966 449130 E: Alison@lincolnbeasley.co.uk
About Phonetic Arts
Cambridge based Phonetic Arts was founded in 2006 by Paul Taylor, Ian Hodson and Anthony Tomlinson. The company delivers technology that generates natural expressive speech, allowing computer games to say any sentence in any type of voice. With world leading expertise in all aspects of speech technology, our goal is to free games developers from the constraints of recorded samples and allow them to create rich, expressive and responsive dialog within their games. The product ‘PA 2009' will be available in Q4 of 2009. www.phonetic-arts.com