Thursday, January 24, 2013

Amazon acquires Kindle Fire text-to-speech provider, but this isn't about Siri

Amazon's Siri

On Thursday morning, Amazon announced its acquisition of Ivona Software, a text-to-speech company. Ivona already powers the "Text-to-Speech," "Voice Guide" and "Explore by Touch" accessibility features of Amazon's Kindle Fire, so bringing those in-house creates some obvious synergies there — but its primary business is Speech Cloud, a software-as-a-service infrastructure that companies use to automate call centers or add e-mail-to-speech functionality. Ivona is eleven years old, and was founded in Poland by engineers Łukasz Osowski and Michał Kaszczuk. The company is very big in Poland and Eastern Europe, but has global reach, which is important in obvious ways both for the thorny problem of text-to-speech in multiple languages, and...


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