Found this great article yesterday talking about Ananova. We were already doing TTS in 2000 when she hit, and it was a great sign that text to speech would be going mainstream. Hasn't gone as mainstream as we thought, but still making strides.
New talking heads on the block
She was an absolute hit on the web in 2000. On April 19, 2000 she spoke the famous first words: "Hello world. Here is the news. And this time it's personal." It was Ananova, the synthetic figurehead of the British Press Association, performing as a woman newscaster, who reads the personal selection of news items to a web user 24/7. Her designers Digital Animation described her as 28 years old, 1.75 meters tall, pleasant and intelligent.
Her appearance sparked excitement. She was a technological milestone; computer-simulated animation, syntetic voice. She was an embodied agent. The speech system was the speech synthesis using rVoice from Rhetorical Systems, now Nuance Communications. This generated quite some interest. It looked like the text-to-speech industry was about to break through. Around the time of Ananova’s launch I was in Cambridge (UK) at the BT laboratory, where they demonstrated text-to-speech applications for mobiles. Funny enough the applications have never become real commercial services.
For the press world she was the symbol of innovation: personal news delivered by a personality. Besides services like personal news services on internet, the mobile world showed interest. A combination of personal news and mobile would deliver a new service. Just imagine: every morning the personal news selection is downloaded to the mobile phone; you start driving, a pretty person appears on the screen of the mobile and starts reading your personal selection of news items.
It only lasted two months before the mobile company Orange picked Ananova up for 126 million euro. In 2002 they started a news services for their mobile subscribers, but this was just a text service. They kept Ananova alive till 2004, but never did implement the technology behind it for a mobile news service. In 2004 the company discontinued the animated service on the web with the announcement that “Ananova video is currently under development. Come back soon to check the latest.” Three years later nothing has happened and the announcement is still on the page. By now Ananova is out of sync with the web and never transformed the delivery of news. Rest of the Story...
Was able to dig up 2 neat youtube clips related here, one of the original Ananova, and one of news coverage around her debut...
2 comments:
Awesome post Ken. I didn't know that a TTS voice got so much PR when it first came out.
Just an FYI, Nuance has stopped supporting Rhetorical rVoice starting Sept. 2007.
I really liked those rVoice's the first time I heard them. We had just started talks about selling them, when rhetorical was purchased.
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