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

Today we are thrilled to announce our Select and Speak extension for Chrome browsers. This extension will allow you to select text and have it read by our human-quality text-to-speech. To download this extension for Chrome, please visit: Select and Speak for Chrome

Extension in action.

Settings

Please note that we’re still working on improvements, so it is still in beta.

We have an exciting announcement today. Today we are bringing our speech technology to iOS, Android and BlackBerry Apps with the launch of a new SDK.

Our new self-service platform allows developers to integrate text to speech and speech recognition into their own apps. And the service is free to all mobile developers with support for iOS, Android and BlackBerry devices.

The SDKs and APIs can provide you with over 40 text to speech voices with support for more than 25 languages, with more coming in the future.

Click here more information on speech recognition and text to speech.

iSpeech’s DriveSafe.ly Facebook fan page was nominated as one of the finalists for the 2011 SAMMY awards!

We are very happy that our efforts of building a community and loyal fan base are being acknowledged and rewarded with this nomination.

For more information see: http://www.dm2pro.com/articles/20110830_11

Today we’re launching our edgy new text to speech apps, iSpeech Bush and iSpeech Obama. They are available on iOS, Android and BlackBerry. Both apps are free to type in anything and listen to it read aloud in the respective President’s text to speech voice. There’s an upgrade available that allows you to speak your phrase into the phone and have it spoken back (using iSpeech’s speech recognition).

iSpeech Obama

iSpeech Bush

We’re trying to showcase iSpeech technologies through these apps. They are also really entertaining! You can check them out here: http://www.ispeech.org/apps/obama or http://www.ispeech.org/apps/bush

Also check out the write-up by mashable about these apps: http://mashable.com/2011/08/24/obama-bush-voice-apps/

]]> http://www.ispeech.org/blog/index.php/2011/08/ispeech-launches-obama-and-bush-text-to-speech-apps/feed/ 1 http://www.ispeech.org/blog/index.php/2011/08/ispeech-technology-in-about-com-calorie-count-app/ http://www.ispeech.org/blog/index.php/2011/08/ispeech-technology-in-about-com-calorie-count-app/#comments Tue, 16 Aug 2011 19:04:56 +0000 Mike M. http://ispeech.org/blog/?p=283

As featured on Techcrunch, iSpeech is proud to provide voice recognition for About.com’s Calorie Count mobile application. If you are interested in adding any of our services to your mobile application, please visit our developer portal. It’s free.

Check out their video for more details:

http://www.readwriteweb.com did a nice write up about our TTS SDK release. For the article, head over to readwriteweb.com .