As you may have noticed, it has been an active few weeks here at Mycroft headquarters. In addition to being accepted into and starting the first week at the illustrious Techstars program at the Sprint Accelerator we have an exciting new partnership to announce.
Before that we would like to take time to thank some of our contributors:
LongBoolean and Forslund have volunteered to be maintainers for Mimic. Next a shoutout to Testman, our IRC Op. And Zeehio, Slavahst, and ivuk have all contributed to Mimic. Many thanks from the Mycroft team.
Mycroft AI has partnered with VocaliD to develop high quality text to speech software for the open source community. The companies’ new text tospeech (TTS) engine, called Mimic, is based on Flite. Flite is open source software firstdeveloped at Carnegie Mellon University. In addition to powering Mycroft, the world’s first open source artificial intelligence, Mimic will be used by Dr. Rupal Patel and the VocaliD team to provide customized voices for clients with speech impediments.
VocaliD will be contributing their broad expertise in speech science to the project, while Mycroft AI’s software team works to improve the performance and portability of the TTS engine.
VocaliD is a Massachusetts based company that connects voices to identities. The company’s technology allows them to create synthetic voices that are as unique as fingerprints. This allows VocaliD’s clients to speak with a personalized voice that fits their gender, age and background –something that until now has been impossible. Using the Mimic engine as part of VocaliD’s personalized voice service will enable clients to sound more natural than they ever have before.
Working together VocaliD and Mycroft are engaging the imagination of the open source community and collaborating on the world’s fastest and most natural sounding text to speech engine.
Members of the open source community who are looking to contribute to Mimic can find more information at Mycroft Mimic page. Contributors who might not have the time or expertise to develop software are encouraged to participate by sharing their voices with the Human Voicebank platform which powers the creation of personalized voices – so every voice is heard.
A short video about Mimic can be found on Youtube and Dr. Rupal Patel gave a compeling TED talk about her project.
Kris is a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Mycroft. She helped develop and executed on the social media strategy for the Kickstarter and continues managing social media in her role as Social Media Manager at Mycroft today.