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Rhetorical Group plc
www.rhetoricalsystems.com
Keith EdwardsApplications Manager
January 2001
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Group history
Apr 2000 Rhetorical Systems incorporated
Jun 2000 Toshiba place 2 year,
£1.7m contract
Oct 2000 Rhetorical Group plc created
Dec 2000 £2m private placement investment,
Rhetorical Group valued at £14m
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Rhetorical today
35 full-time staff
Largest speech synthesis R&D team in the world
Aim: to be the best in the world at high quality,
flexible text-to-speech synthesis
- widest range of applications / domains
- widest range of voices, accents, personalities
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Focus of Rhetorical Group
Text - to - Speech synthesis: High intelligibility
- latest unit selection techniques
Pushing the barriers of naturalness- voices modelled on human voices and often almost indistinguishable from the original voice
High flexibility- multi language, multi accent, multi voice
- modular system architecture
Core product: rVoice (launch: Q2 2001)
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Technological breakthrough
‘Traditional’ approaches:
Formant based synthesis
Diphone based synthesis
- lacking vitality
- monotonic
- not suitable for extended use
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rVoice:
Variable Unit Selection- more natural sounding
- suitable for extended use
- in many applications almost indistinguishable
from a human voice
“Welcome to our new speech synthesiser.”
Technological breakthrough
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rVoice outlook
Applications and platforms:- telephony / mobile communications industry- games industry- internet
Input mechanisms:- unrestricted text (TTS)- domain specific text- concept to speech, with language generation
Voices and languages:- rVoice rapid voice prototyper- different accents and languages covered
All within a single generic system
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rVoice core capabilities
Domain specific synthesis:
Flexible, scalable solution- Airline information
- Car travel directions
- Financial news
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Currently only UK English available US English by Q1 2001 German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian by Q4 2001 Multi-accent English lexicon (110,000 words)
- 200,000 by Q4 2001 Semi-automatic prototyping of prosody High scalability
- building voices from any quantity of data
Same engine for all languages
rVoice core capabilities
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Talking heads
Ongoing work on rFace
Ability to capture 3D model of any head, and combine it with speech
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Rhetorical team
Senior Management- Marc Moens (CEO)
- Paul Taylor (CTO)- Peter Denyer (Chairman)
Research Group Product Development Group Consultancy Group Applications Group Full Team: 35 people
- 12 with PhDs
- 6 studying part-time PhDs
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Rhetorical’s Attractions
Competitive, industry scale salaries Generous share option scheme Informal working environment PhD study opportunities via CSTR or LTG Edinburgh – “the Athens of the North” Free coffee and donuts (really!)
We’re an exciting new company with great
people, great technology, and great prospects!
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Make rVoice your voice!