Product Overview of Cepstral
Cepstral LLC is a leading provider of advanced Text-to-Speech (TTS) technologies and services, specializing in the spoken delivery of information. Here’s an overview of what Cepstral offers and its key features:
What Cepstral Does
Cepstral develops and provides high-quality, natural-sounding TTS engines and voices designed for various applications, including hand-held devices, desktop systems, and server platforms. Their technology is tailored for the spoken delivery of information, making it versatile and widely applicable in different sectors such as telephony, customer service, and multimedia presentations.
Key Features of Cepstral TTS
Audio Quality and Naturalness
- Cepstral’s TTS engines, particularly the latest version, Cepstral 6, boast dramatically improved audio quality, optimized for crystal clarity over phone lines and other audio systems.
- The technology includes optimized unit selection and ultra-smooth joins, resulting in more natural-sounding speech with fewer errors.
Customization and Control
- Users can customize the pronunciation of specific words by editing the voice’s lexicon.
- Cepstral supports multiple interfaces for altering TTS prosody, including Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML), Microsoft’s Speech Application Programming Interface (SAPI), and Apple’s Embedded Speech Commands (ESCs). These tools allow control over attributes such as rate, volume, and pitch, and enable features like inserting pauses and switching between voices.
Integration and Compatibility
- Cepstral 6 is specifically designed for integration with telephony systems, including seamless integration with Asterisk IVR/PBX systems and compatibility with SAPI 5.4 for Windows-based applications.
- However, it is important to note that Cepstral 6 products are not backwards compatible with Cepstral 5 due to the new licensing system.
Concurrency and Licensing
- The system supports concurrent synthesis ports, where one port can stream audio to one call. This ensures that the TTS engine can handle multiple calls simultaneously without issues.
- The licensing system has been revamped for reliability and stability, but it does not allow mixing and matching of version 5 and version 6 products.
Additional Features
- Cepstral 6 includes a feature to save audio output to files, which is useful for creating offline prompts. This feature, however, requires a separate license and is designed to prevent the TTS engine from being used as an audio file server.
- Users can monitor the Cepstral Telephony Server using the swift command line tool, which provides detailed information about the server’s status and concurrency port usage.
Versatility and Deployment
Cepstral’s TTS technology is highly versatile and can be deployed on various platforms, including mobile devices and server platforms, with a small memory footprint and low computing resource requirements. This makes it suitable for a wide range of applications, from handheld devices to multiple instances on server platforms.
In summary, Cepstral offers advanced TTS solutions with enhanced audio quality, customization options, and seamless integration with various systems, making it a robust and versatile tool for delivering spoken information.