These days, cost is a common reason to not use a new technology. With a new and aggressive pricing strategy for its WTS701 Text-To-Speech processor, Winbond Electronics hopes to eliminate this obstacle once and for all. This single-chip processor is being offered at a cost of $7.00 in 25,000-volume quantities. On a separate note, the company also announced that the chip is available in a female English language version (WTS701EF/T). This is in addition to the already available male English and female Mandarin speech versions.

The WTS701 processor chip is considered to be the industry's first single-chip processor capable of converting text to speech (TTS). It works to create more natural, realistic, and pleasant-sounding speech by converting text to speech using recorded human-speech samples. This ensures that the output is a recognizable human voice, unlike other computer-generated synthesis solutions currently on the market.

At the heart of the chip is a concatenation algorithm and the company's proprietary Multi-Level-Storage (MLS) technology. The chip also contains two memory arrays: one for the acoustic library and one for the processor program. This combination enables application-specific customization for special characters, such as SMS icons or chat emoticons.

The $7.00 WTS701 TTS processing chip is now available in volume quantities.

Winbond Electronics Corp. America
2727 North First Street, San Jose, CA 95134; (408) 943-6666, FAX: (408) 544-1789, www.winbond.com.