Acapela brings a new voice to the Middle East

Its exceptionally high quality Arabic speech synthesis, already deployed by major partners, is a technological achievement which promises high prospects for the Arabic market, in the fields of mobility, accessibility and telecom.

The specialised language team at Acapela has been analysing the Arabic language for years, in order to create an accurate, natural sounding synthesised voice. Acapela, which already exists in 23 languages, is now available in Arabic.

The lack of vowels in written Arabic make it impossible for speech synthesis to transform the text into voice in the same way as synthesisers do for other languages. 'In order to insert vowels in the text, our research centre collaborated closely with the best specialists for automatic processing of the Arabic language, and in particular with the Egyptian company RDI.

By using this RDI vowel-making module, combined with the knowledge of our specialists in the field of speech processing, Acapela Group has developed a high quality Arabic speech synthesiser, which has never been so close to the human voice,' declared Sofiane Baloul, R&D Engineers at Acapela Group.

Due to an active partnership policy, Acapela has become the leader in speech technologies in the Arabic world. In the field of accessibility, Acapela Group has partnered with 3 companies which develop Arabic screen readers:

- Medialog with a Jaws screen reader (in partnership with Freedom Scientific)

- Nattiq Technologies with the Supernova screen reader (in partnership with Dolphin)

- Visiotech with the Virgo screen reader (in partnership with Baum).

With such renown partners, it is now possible to provide disabled Arabic people with solutions which help them operate more autonomously, with easy and complete access to high tech tools.

In the telecommunications field, Acapela Group enables any Arabic written information to be accessible through the telephone, with the high quality Acapela voice. This represents a significant advantage for telecom integrators, programme editors, manufacturers of vocal platform, and service companies.

SpeechWorkers, an IT Egyptian company dedicated to the development of high standard speech solutions in both Arabic and English, has already been chosen by Saudi Telecom Co (STC) to develop a telephone email reading service, using Acapela's speech synthesis.

Major actors have already tested, approved and chosen Acapela's speech synthesis. These include : Speakatel (UAE), Globitel (Jordan), Somac IT (KSA), ATSI (Egypt), Speechworkers (Egypt), Sisco Kuwait (Kuwait), Alcatel, Atos Origin, Intervoice, Telia and Siemens.