Digium Now Offering Cepstral's 'Allison' Text-to-Speech Voice

Cepstral announced that its “Allison” text-to-speech, Asterisk (News - Alert)-based interactive voice response (IVR) application, is being offered by Digium.

 

Created by Cepstral (News - Alert) through its longstanding partnership with Digium, this application allows customers to use the telephone system voice, that of “Allison Smith,” to customize messages and mix information that cannot be pre-recorded with recorded prompts in the same user-friendly voice.

 

“Allison Smith’s voice is familiar to millions of people—nearly anyone who’s used voicemail or an IVR system knows her,” said Bill Miller (News - Alert), vice president of product management at Digium.

 

He also said Cepstral’s technology is able to convey static and dynamic announcements using Allison’s voice, giving customers greater flexibility in how they can use Asterisk systems.

 

“Now the software is available directly from Digium (News - Alert), with Digium guarantees and support,” Miller added.

 

The text-to-speech software includes a set of pre-recorded Allison voice prompts, and Digium offers a service to provide professionally recorded voice prompts. Digium officials said that the service allows customers to customize their Asterisk voice menus with uncommon names and unusual word combinations.

 

Asterisk is an open source telephony engine, enabling developers and solutions providers to create advanced voice over IP (VoIP) solutions. Open source Asterisk is available under the GNU General Public License (GPL) that can be downloaded by developers.

 

The availability of Cepstral text-to-speech application from Digium enables developers to mix pre-recorded Allison IVR prompts with informational messages; custom prompts; emails; dynamic information, such as appointment or account data; or any other English language text or files.

 

Officials said that this allows the deployment of Asterisk applications that are of uniformly “high quality” and that do not require a mix of human-sounding and computer-generated prompts.

 

“By partnering with Digium to create a synthetic version of Allison’s voice, we’ve added the power of speech technology to further enhance the well-known Asterisk brand,” said Craig Campbell, CEO at Cepstral, adding the ability to use computer automation to “say anything” in Allison’s voice provides a new tool for Asterisk developers and increases the capabilities and value proposition to customers.