The Need

Many visually-impaired people cannot use their phones and computers because there are no text-to-speech voices for their language.

Text-to-speech is a fundamental accessibility technology for blind and visually impaired users of smartphones and computers. TTS provides part of the interaction with applications, documents, websites, and communications.

Sadly, suitable TTS for the blind do not exist for all languages.

We build TTS voices for such languages, and to provide them for free to blind users.

In addition, for low-power smart-phones, the voices which do exist for major languages, are not best suited for use by the blind, for the reasons given below.

The Specific TTS Requirements for the Blind

For TTS to be effective for blind users, it must go beyond simply producing understandable speech.

• Fast responsiveness is critical to maintaining fast navigation across Apps and documents.
• Local, on-device processing is need to protect users’ privacy with nothing the user reads being transmitted to a remote server.
• The TTS must be able to speak intellgbly at high speaking rates, allowing experienced users to process information at speeds comparable to those available with vision.

Together, responsiveness, local processing, and high-speed speech are key requirements for making text-to-speech a practical, private, and empowering tool for everyday computer and smartphone use by the blond