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Rhetorical Group plc

www.rhetoricalsystems.com

Keith EdwardsApplications Manager

January 2001

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Group history

Apr 2000 Rhetorical Systems incorporated

Jun 2000 Toshiba place 2 year,

£1.7m contract

Oct 2000 Rhetorical Group plc created

Dec 2000 £2m private placement investment,

Rhetorical Group valued at £14m

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Rhetorical today

35 full-time staff

Largest speech synthesis R&D team in the world

Aim: to be the best in the world at high quality,

flexible text-to-speech synthesis

- widest range of applications / domains

- widest range of voices, accents, personalities

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Focus of Rhetorical Group

Text - to - Speech synthesis: High intelligibility

- latest unit selection techniques

Pushing the barriers of naturalness- voices modelled on human voices and often almost indistinguishable from the original voice

High flexibility- multi language, multi accent, multi voice

- modular system architecture

Core product: rVoice (launch: Q2 2001)

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Technological breakthrough

‘Traditional’ approaches:

Formant based synthesis

Diphone based synthesis

- lacking vitality

- monotonic

- not suitable for extended use

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rVoice:

Variable Unit Selection- more natural sounding

- suitable for extended use

- in many applications almost indistinguishable

from a human voice

“Welcome to our new speech synthesiser.”

Technological breakthrough

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rVoice outlook

Applications and platforms:- telephony / mobile communications industry- games industry- internet

Input mechanisms:- unrestricted text (TTS)- domain specific text- concept to speech, with language generation

Voices and languages:- rVoice rapid voice prototyper- different accents and languages covered

All within a single generic system

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rVoice core capabilities

Domain specific synthesis:

Flexible, scalable solution- Airline information

- Car travel directions

- Financial news

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Currently only UK English available US English by Q1 2001 German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian by Q4 2001 Multi-accent English lexicon (110,000 words)

- 200,000 by Q4 2001 Semi-automatic prototyping of prosody High scalability

- building voices from any quantity of data

Same engine for all languages

rVoice core capabilities

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Talking heads

Ongoing work on rFace

Ability to capture 3D model of any head, and combine it with speech

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Rhetorical team

Senior Management- Marc Moens (CEO)

- Paul Taylor (CTO)- Peter Denyer (Chairman)

Research Group Product Development Group Consultancy Group Applications Group Full Team: 35 people

- 12 with PhDs

- 6 studying part-time PhDs

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Rhetorical’s Attractions

Competitive, industry scale salaries Generous share option scheme Informal working environment PhD study opportunities via CSTR or LTG Edinburgh – “the Athens of the North” Free coffee and donuts (really!)

We’re an exciting new company with great

people, great technology, and great prospects!

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Make rVoice your voice!