The company SpeechTech, s.r.o. (Ltd.) was established in 2000 as a spin-off firm of the University of West Bohemia (UWB) in Pilsen. There is close collaboration between SpeechTech and the Department of Cybernetics, UWB, a leading research center of speech technology in the Czech Republic.
SpeechTech develops interactive voice response telephone dialogue systems based primarily on its own TTS/ASR technology. The latest products of SpeechTech are TTS/ASR for embedded systems (PDAs, car computers). SpeechTech deals exclusively in the voice technology R&D area.
The main SpeechTech product is ERIS - Engine for Recognition, Identification and Synthesis. ERIS can be incorporated into many applications where some speech input/output is desired, i.e. reading e-mail or database entries, in voice dialogue systems etc. The first launched part of ERIS was the ERIS TTS Engine. It converts arbitrary Czech, Slovak, and German text to the corresponding speech output; English, French versions are being prepared. The ERIS TTS Engine is a high quality text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis software library developed by SpeechTech in 2002. Due to its platform independent design it currently runs on Microsoft Windows, Windows CE, and Linux. The TTS Engine supports many API such as Microsoft SAPI and VoiceXML.