PITTSBURGH, PA -- 08/20/07 --
Cepstral LLC is proud to announce that it is
providing the first open source Media Resource Control Protocol (MRCP)
library, OpenMRCP, at no charge to telephony application developers today.
Cepstral, a pioneer in Text-to-Speech (TTS) voice software, is donating
OpenMRCP to the developer community in order to spur the development of
telephony applications that interact with distributed speech resources such
as TTS and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). MRCP is a standards-based
communications protocol that allows telephony applications to communicate
with speech resources, similar to the way TCP/IP allows browsers to
communicate with web sites.
MRCP has been widely adopted by many of the largest telephony platforms and
speech technology vendors. However, from its 2002 inception until now,
sample MRCP source code has never been publicly published. Cepstral
sponsored OpenMRCP in an effort to lower entrance barriers for developers
and to focus efforts on the creation of meaningful applications. "The
previous requirement for each company to re-invent the protocol layer was
inefficient. By seeding the community with a freely distributed protocol
stack, Cepstral hopes OpenMRCP will accelerate the development of speech
applications," said Cepstral CEO, Craig Campbell.
OpenMRCP has already saved at least one "man-year" of effort for two
telephony providers. FreeSWITCH, an open source telephony platform, has
added MRCP v1 and v2 client support for ASR and TTS using the OpenMRCP
library as part of its Beta 1 release. UK-based Cereproc is adding MRCP v1
and v2 server support for its Text-to-Speech voices. "OpenMRCP levels the
playing field. MRCP compliance will allow customers to test and deploy our
new high-quality TTS voices with little or no engineering effort," said
Cereproc CEO Paul Welham.
MRCP has been adopted by many levels of the telephony industry. "OpenMRCP
is our gift to the developer community, and we hope it will encourage the
deployment of a broad range of speech applications. Speech technology is
one of the keys to Web 3.0, and OpenMRCP brings us one step closer," said
Campbell. The open source MRCP library is available for download at
www.openmrcp.org.
About Cepstral LLC
Cepstral is a speech technology company based in Pittsburgh, PA, USA, which
provides Text-to-Speech voices for the spoken delivery of information. We
build high quality, natural sounding voices for hand-held, desktop, and
server applications. Cepstral: We Build Voices(TM).
Contact:
Craig Campbell
Cepstral, LLC
412/432-0400 Ext. 604
Email Contact
http://www.cepstral.com
