Everyone may download and use Carmen, the newest voice of IVONA – the Text-To-Speech system considered one of the best in the world, starting today.

President of IVO Software, IVONA’s creator, Lukasz Osowski, says: “We decided to make a Romanian voice for two main reasons – first: Romanian high quality TTS voice was never made before; and second: Romanian language is not easy to build and we like that. Carmen is a female Romanian-speaking voice practically impossible to distinguish from a natural voice. When developing the current version we drew on the experiences acquired during the prestigious international Blizzard Challenge where in 2006 and 2007 our text to speech system received the highest scores year by year. The new Carmen may be of particular interest to designers of telecommunication systems and to hardware and software manufacturers who intend to expand into the Romanian and Moldovan markets”.

Beginning today, everyone may download a version of IVONA with Carmen’s voice from http://www.ivona.com . A range of IVO Software’s IVONA-based products makes it possible to implement the text to speech system with Carmen’s voice in various IT and communication systems. Enabling Carmen's use in telecommunication systems, such as Call Center or IVR, one of these products is IVONA Telecom, designed for the Romanian market. IVONA SDK in turn, offers Carmen’s services to hardware and software manufacturers wishing to implement the Romanian-speaking voice in mobile devices, GPS systems etc. You can use IVONA Professional, if you need a Romanian voice-over for a presentation or if you need to prepare an audiobook.

Mainly in Romania and Moldova, Romanian is spoken by over 24 million people. These are both countries of Central-Eastern Europe and, since 1 January 2007 Romania is a Member State of the European Union.

At http://www.ivona.com users can test Carmen and other IVONA-generated voices. The website contains also more detailed overview of IVONA-based products and a discussion of their possible applications. In turn, private computer users can use Carmen or other IVONA's virtual voices with Expressivo. It is an application that can read any text with a human voice. It may also be used to facilitate learning of foreign languages or to read out film subtitles. Expressivo allows you to listen to books, Web pages, RSS feeds, and e-mails as well – not only using a computer but also with a portable MP3 player (e.g. iPod or iPhone). To find out more about Expressivo visit http://www.expressivo.com .