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The Pantech Group, the second largest mobile phone company in South Korea, has agreed to use Nuance Communications RealSpeak Mobile SF to power its PG-6200, PG-8000 and PG-3700 mobile phones in multiple languages, including Russian, English and Mandarin.
RealSpeak is a text-to-speech engine designed to accurately convert text into clear, synthesized speech, delivering high-quality readings of SMS and e-mail messages.
The products are already available in Russia and Taiwan.
“We believe this partnership with Nuance Communications will add a significant edge both to our handsets and our ability to roll out new products in different parts of the world,” said Tae Hyun Jung, vice president of Pantechs R&D planning division, in a prepared statement.
The companys goal, he continued, “is to selectively increase the scope of our service in a number of key markets, and being able to provide handsets that are fully functional in local languages will be integral to this process.”
More than 30 manufacturers worldwide have utilized Nuance solutions in more than 50 million devices, including cellular phones, smart phones and PDAs.
Nuance officials said RealSpeak Mobile provides a scalable embedded text-to-speech system for mobile phones. With RealSpeak, any SMS and e-mail from a users inbox can be read aloud in more than 20 languages and 30 voices, Nuance officials said
They also said that the features are available in different memory configurations, ranging from a low footprint, entry level version—RealSpeak Mobile SF—to the very high speech quality and advanced text processing of RealSpeak Mobile HQ.
“Phones have always been a natural for speech technology, but until recently handsets lacked the processing power and memory to make it work,” said Craig Peddie, vice president for embedded speech solutions for Nuance, in the same statement.
“Today this has changed, and there are now 50 million phones shipping with Nuance speech technologies. Our technology is cost effective, accurate, easy to use and easy to integrate.”