Company timeline

2018

• New major version of my-own-voice, based on Acapela DNN.

• Voices for Chromebooks

• Partnership with SoundHound

• Dutch children’s voices, Merel and Thijs

2017

• Creation of Acapela Inclusive Business Unit

• Acapela DNN: Innovative voice creation based on deep learning

• New children’s voices: Italian (Aurora and Alessio)

2016

• New children’s voices: Norwegian (Emilie and Elias)

• New children’s voices: French (Elise and Valentin)

• New Children’s voices: Swedish (Freja and Filip)

2015

• Acquisition of Creawave

• New German voice: Claudia

• New language: Sami and new voices, ‘Elle’ and ‘Biera’

• New US English voice: ‘Sharon’

• Acapela TTS voices for NVDA

2014

• Voice banking: my-own-voice

• New Scottish english voice: ‘Rhona’

• Creation of Acapela Transport Business Unit

• New French voice: ‘Manon’

   

• Genuine bilingual US Spanish-English children’s text to speech voices: ‘Valeria & Emilio’

2012

• Acapela TTS voices for Android, on Google Play

• 30 languages & 100 voices available !

• Child voices world premiere: ‘Ella’ and ‘Josh’ (US English) and ‘Rosie’ and ‘Harry’ (UK English) for & by children

• 2.5 million talkative apps & 100 apps featured in the acapela for iOS gallery

• Japanese voice, ‘Sakura’

• Chinese voice, ‘Lulu’

• Story telling voices  Will, Antoine

• Expressive voices: up to 4 different ways to express moods and feelings: happy, sad, fromAfar and Upclose  (US English, UK English, French, Greek, Bengian Dutch)

• iVox 3: Voices for iMac OS X

• R&D – ‘MARDI’ project: Man Robot Dialogue in situated manner. (partners: SUPELEC, LIA, LAAS)

• R&D- ‘D-BOX’ project: conversational and multilingual agents

   

• R&D -‘content4all’ project: to enhance the reading of long texts

2011

• Character voices – Hip hop (Saul) and Country (Micah)

• Swedish dialect voices : Göteborg and Skåne

• Australian English voice: ‘Tyler’

• Indian English voice: ‘Deepa’

• Celebrity voice: ‘Queen Elizabeth’

• Solution for Android: www.acapela-for-android.com

• R&D- DiYSE projects

2010

• PATENT HMM TTS: Speech Synthesis and Coding Methods – European patent application: EP 2 242 045 A1

• Swedish of Finland voice : Samuel, for NOSS

• Infovox3, all-in-one local and portable talking companion for visually impaired users

• 1st self-service audio production web app: www.acapela-box.com

• MRCPv2 full support

• R&D –‘Romeo’ project:  humanoid assistant

• R&D -‘Emospeech’ (Eurostar project): natural and emotional interaction with virtual environments

• R&D –‘Biospeak’ project:  development and improvement of voice transformation paradigms

2009

• Full bilingual Arabic-English voice: ‘Nizar’

• Low Footprint voices for mobiles (LF)

• R&D-‘GVLEX’ project: Gesture and voice for expressive reading

2008

• www.acapela.tv, online sparkling online laboratory

• Acapela TTS for iPhone SDK

• ISO certification

• www.acapela-vaas.com: on-line service for smart vocalization

• First custom voices with Acapela Voice Factory

• First talking greetings with Winter Bunny

• R&D – HMMTTS First Entreprise Project: new TTS technology based on HMM (Hidden Markov Models)

2007

• R&D- ‘Indigo’ project: human-robot interaction

2006

• Infovox iVox

2005

• R&D-Boon Companion (ITEA project)

• R&D-DIVINES project: Diagnostic and Intrinsic Variabilities in Natural Speech

2004

• First Arabic TTS

• Infovox Desktop

• R&D – ULYCES: Telematic platform for the automotive industry, based on Win CE technology

• Virtual Speaker

2003

• Creation of Acapela Group. Merger of 3 European speech experts:: Babel Technologies (BE), Elan speech (FR) and Infovox (SWE).