Today we’d like to spotlight yet another one of our partner apps: Speaktoit Assistant. It is an Android App that mimics Apple’s Siri on Google’s platform. The application is intended to act as a virtual assistant responding to web searches and other tasks. Speaktoit Assistant can be used to launch apps, find contacts, compose email or text messages, create calendar events, give directions, etc.

The information will then be given back to you using our very own text to speech voice combined with Google’s voice transcription to create a dialog between user and the application.

The Talking Alarm, an application that reads out content to users in the morning has released version 1.2. In addition to read out information such as weather, calendar stock prices, and horoscopes using iSpeech text to speech technology, the application also plays music and features multiple alarms.

You can find the application here.

We are happy to announce that we just launched our Facebook chat application, iSpeech FB Chat Pro, for BlackBerry phones. You can get the application from BlackBerry App World .

iSpeech FB Chat Pro™ lets you chat with Facebook friends on your BlackBerry® smartphone by speaking or typing your message.

•Speak your Facebook message or type it
•See which of your Facebook friends are online
•View your active chats
•Chat with your Facebook friends

iSpeech FB Chat Pro™ is the only Facebook chat app that allows you to speak your message simply by using the “microphone button” on the screen. Once you speak your message, it will appear in the text box, ready to send.

Our CEO, Heath Ahrens, was presenting this week at this year’s Mobile Voice Conference in San Francisco, CA. His presentation was part of the “Mobile speech interfaces: Alternatives and effective design”-block of presentations. Specifically, Heath presented on the topic of ‘Taking speech mainstream: Bringing it to the mobile development community’.
Considering how many partnerships iSpeech has formed with mobile application developers enabling them to use speech in their applications, Heath was able to share our experience in this field with the attendees of the conference.

Heath (CEO of iSpeech) presenting at the Mobile Voice Conference 2012.

The Mobile Voice Conference is co-organized by the Applied Voice Input Output Society (AVIOS) and Bill Meisel (President, TMA Associates). The conference is unlike most conferences in that it is a very small and very focused conference. In their own words the organisers describe it as

The conference is a small, limited-attendance event without an exhibit hall. It’s small size attracts industry leaders and top speakers that want to interact with their peers and hear talks with significant, practical, and insightful content that goes well beyond the usual sales pitches.

Congrats to iSpeech partner Vocre, an innovative translation application, on the great coverage. Vocre is using iSpeech’s human quality text to speech technology to speak aloud translated user input in foreign languages. The application goes a step beyond using Google Translate by crowd-sourcing translation results and corrections. This application is particularly useful to communicate with people while traveling abroad. SmartPlanet reports on this application:

For the full article, head over to CNet:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57386794-76/vocre-mobile-app-aims-to-simplify-language-translation-video/

Our application, iSpeech Translator, was chosen to be featured as one of 10 applications at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona by Movistar, a major Spanish mobile phone operator.

Mobile World Congress is a long running exhibition and conference currently held in Barcelona every year and features some of the biggest companies in mobile technology. About 1400 exhibitors are participating in MWC. The conference usually attracts 50,000 – 60,000 attendees and this year’s overlying theme is Redefining Mobile.

Heath Ahrens, CEO and founder of iSpeech, was invited by New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) to present at the TEDx event they were running this year.

He was asked to present about how to get a bootstrapped company off the ground and share his experience that were gained while starting and running iSpeech. This experience stems from him starting a company from an idea a few years ago and bringing it to the top of speech recognition and text to speech companies. Applications powered by iSpeech have been downloaded over 25 million times and the number just keeps growing.

Here is the video of his presentation:

For more information on TEDxNJIT

Progress on our text to speech and speech recognition products:

iSpeech offers Text to Speech (TTS) and Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) services with over 100 TTS voices and over 25 ASR languages.

Services are supported through a cloud-based REST API and six SDKs.

We have been reading your sales inquiries as well as your technical questions on the dev forum.  Continue reading about the services we offer, recent updates, and future developments.

Free Mobile SDKs (Free API access)

Available for free and free to use in your apps.  Check out some apps already being powered by iSpeech.

• iPhone SDK (Free – Last updated: 11-02-2011)
• Android SDK (Free – Last updated: 10-13-2011)
• BlackBerry SDK (Free – Last updated: 10-14-2011)

Free Server SDKs (Paid API access) 

Available to download for free and requires purchasing prepaid API credits.

• Java SDK (Last updated: 09-07-2011)
• .NET C# SDK  (Last updated: 06-14-2011)
• PHP Beta SDK (Last updated: 10-18-2011)

Feature Roadmap

- Improved quality speech recognition
- Embedded TTS SDKs for offline use
- Language Translation API (not yet open to the public)
- Speech recognition for websites using Javascript/Flash (December) and Javascript/Java applet
- API to retrieve key properties in real-time
- API for retrieving voxemes, phonemes, and word boundaries
- Voice Effects (VST / AU)
- Fast downloads for large TTS conversions (documents) 

Just this past week iSpeech was a proud sponsor of the 2011 BlackBerry’s DevCon Americas. According to their website:

The BlackBerry® Developer Conference is the showcase for the latest innovations and breakthroughs with the BlackBerry® Development Platform. Thousands of BlackBerry enthusiasts come together to collaborate with platform experts from the community and attend sessions, demonstrations, hands-on labs and keynotes — all focused on developing leading mobile applications, no matter your skill level.

Being one of the leading application developers for BlackBerry phones, we gladly added our support to help make the event a great success.

If you want to add iSpeech technology to your application, do not miss our BlackBerry TTS SDK

Due to the service outages BlackBerry customers experienced last week, BlackBerry maker RIM (Research In Motion) decided to apologise to the customers by offering some popular applications to customers for free, together with a month of free support for their devices.

Among these applications are three of our very own award-winning applications:

DriveSafe.ly Pro

DriveSafe.ly Enterprise Edition

iSpeech Translator Pro

To get these applications, simply “purchase” them in BlackBerry App World and enjoy!

For more information, please see RIM’s press release at: http://press.rim.com/release.jsp?id=5214