IVONA is already instrumental in helping us deliver excellent accessibility features on Kindle Fire, including Text-to-Speech, Voice Guide and Explore by Touch,” said Dave Limp, Vice President, Amazon Kindle, in a statement. “IVONA’s exceptional text-to-speech technology leads the industry in natural voice quality, accuracy and ease of use. Additionally, IVONA delivers text-to-speech products and services for thousands of developers, businesses and customers around the world. IVONA delivers world-class technologies that power the “Text-to-Speech,” “Voice Guide” and “Explore by Touch” features on Kindle Fire tablets. today announced that it has acquired leading text-to-speech technology company IVONA Software.
Update: An Amazon spokesperson had this to say, confirming that Ivona will continue to work with third parties, meaning that this provides another bridge out for Amazon both to enterprise cloud services as well as to developers, specifically in the area of voice recognition: “Yes – IVONA will continue to provide voice solutions for our Kindle Fire tablets (text-to-speech, voice guide, explore-by-touch) and also continue to distribute their products and services to developers, businesses and customers around the world.” Ivona could potentially also get used by Amazon in its wider suite of enterprise, cloud-based services, which also includes hosting and other data management via Amazon Web Services. (Amazon is doing a lot to court developers and continues to extend the ways in which to link them into its own platform.) It could see Amazon offering out the speech recognition capability in the form of an API, something that Apple has yet to do with Siri, for developers to use in their apps for the Kindle Fire and other platforms. Unless Amazon decides to take Ivona in-house completely, and use its tech exclusively in its own products, this presents a couple of opportunities.
Online ivona reader update#
We’re contacting Ivona to ask the question and will update as we learn more, but currently, Ivona works with other organizations and businesses, to provide voice recognition, and it has also made a big push on growing its developer ecosystem. What’s still unclear is how Ivona’s existing business will develop. Over the last year, the company has been ramping up products and Kindle stores for countries outside of the U.S., including finally launching the Kindle Fire tablets internationally. Ivona’s products, the company says, are already available for 44 voices in 17 languages “and more in development”, which points to how Amazon can use the technology to underpin its international ambitions. Here is what one of the voice features looks like currently on the Kindle Fire:
“The IVONA team shares our passion for innovation and customer obsession, and we look forward to building great products to deliver world-class voice solutions to customers around the world.”Īlthough Amazon’s use of voice recognition today isn’t as highlighted and center-stage as Siri is in Apple’s iOS, it’s nevertheless an important part of the company’s business proposition, since a cornerstone of Amazon’s content is based in reading and “reading” in different formats, like audiobooks.
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