At Acapela we love voices, and we aim to offer users voices that sound authentic. Today, we are very happy to introduce to you Rhona, a new authentic voice that will finally provide users with an English female voice that truly sounds Scottish.

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Rhona will potentially serve a population of 5.3 million inhabitants, delivering a voice of choice for transport or navigation, for phone services, to read, learn or communicate, a voice for devices, for Accessibility, etc.

 

Rhona has mastered specificities of Scottish English such as an accurate pronunciation of “ch” (the throaty unvoiced sound at the end of “loch”). See the review from Call Scotland. Rhona has already been deployed for public transport purposes by First Group Scotland to accurately pronounce the names of stations.  We also had very positive initial feedback from AAC device users. A great start for Rhona and we look forward to her voice being deployed and used in many different contexts.

 

Hear Voice samples

 

Because one standard synthetic voice can’t possibly satisfy all needs, we develop voices that speak several languages and dialects, have different accents, convey different moods and are for all ages. We even create character or celebrity voices and we are participating in R&D projects to make text to speech sing, convey emotions or tell a story.

 

‘We love challenges and as a leading expert we look forward to forging ahead with new speech solutions. We constantly innovate and enrich our repertoire to reflect diversity and respond to demanding users who are looking for a natural audio result and authenticity’ comments Lars-Erik Larsson, CEO of Acapela Group.

 

Type in your own words and play with Rhona online in Acapela’s interactive demo.

 

Rhona is already available in Acapela’s main products and will be fully available throughout our product range by the end of November 2014. Deployment in third party products depends of course on the company’s own product roadmap.