Industry News SEGA Enters Partnership With Toshiba for Speech Synthesis Technology

[Dreadknux]

SEGA will be utilising a new 'speech synthesis' technology developed by Toshiba for its games over the next three years, as the two companies announced a formal business partnership that aims to expand the use of 'text-to-speech' in the industry.

As Gamespot reports, Toshiba's speech synthesis technology, "normally used for input assistance on PCs and car navigation systems," has a small memory requirement, making it "convenient for game consoles... [it] also complies with TTS (text-to-speech) standards and has the ability to analyze a human voice to imitate its tone and speech behaviors."

We doubt SEGA will have much use in the Sonic space for this kind of tech. Indeed, the first announced game to use speech synthesis will be upcoming PS2 and Gamecube horse racing game Derby Tsuku 3, where the announcer's voice will be able to properly pronounce the player's custom names for their horses. But you never know - there may be more interesting applications for this than simply reading text inputs. We'll see!

Source: Gamespot

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