ReadSpeaker, the digital voice design company, has developed the French voice of the Sonos Voice Control experience for Sonos, the world’s leading sound experience company

The partnership highlights how custom neural voices are increasingly important to brands as a new strategic asset for brand identity and recognition.

Paris, France. – December 15, 2022 – ReadSpeaker, the most trusted, independent digital voice partner for global businesses, today announced the creation of the French voice of the Sonos Voice Control experience for Sonos, the world’s leading sound experience company. Sonos selected VoiceLab, ReadSpeaker’s custom voice production unit, because of the company’s proven experience and expertise in state-of-the-art, AI-driven text-to-speech.

The collaboration between ReadSpeaker and Sonos illustrates a growing trend in consumer brands looking to develop their own unique voice experiences to provide their customers and users with personalized experiences, and improve the usability of their products.

Joseph Dureau, Vice President of Voice Experience at Sonos commented “We collaborated with ReadSpeaker to create the French voice for Sonos Voice Control. Their expertise in AI-driven text-to-speech and their approach to personalized voice is both innovative and extremely thorough, which is exactly what we needed for this project. The collaboration with ReadSpeaker’s VoiceLab linguistic team has been essential in support for us throughout this project, from the development phase to the launch.”

Roy Lindemann, CMO and CCO EMEA, at ReadSpeaker explains “By partnering with Sonos, we are helping to bring a major brand’s voice to life in an innovative and exciting way. The technology developed by our VoiceLab team creates voice personas to speech-enable unique experiences. More and more users are using digital voice in their daily lives, from choosing a music playlist to asking about the weather. Having a personalized voice to deliver a quality, tailored user experience in real time is a major challenge for brands today.”

The inception of creating the personalized the French voice for the Sonos Voice Control voice experience

ReadSpeaker’s VoiceLab managed the entire development process – including recording sessions with the French voice talent, processing the recorded data and training the Deep Neural Networking (DNN) models with it, managing quality control, and delivery of all the necessary quality assurance steps. Due to the technical nature of the voice recordings required to develop a personalized voice – which demands that the speech be delivered in an extremely consistent manner with precise articulation and style – VoiceLab experts worked closely with the voice talent every step of the way.

The technological challenge

One of the main challenges in developing the personalized voice for Sonos was the need to understand and pronounce the non-standard textual content often found in the music industry. It was also essential that the Sonos Voice Control voice experience be able to read information regarding artist, track or album in multiple languages. The VoiceLab team worked closely with Sonos and the voice talent to optimize the voice output in this very broad area.

The ReadSpeaker team used AI-based deep neural network (DNN) technology. These models can pronounce words and phrases that the voice talent has never actually recorded. The non-standard text and proper nouns required to read track titles and artists presented a real technological challenge here.

VIDEO

Click here for a look behind the scenes at the development of the bilingual English American and Spanish digital voice based on the actor Giancarlo Esposito for Sonos Voice Control.

For more information on the ReadSpeaker VoiceLab, visit us at https://www.readspeaker.com/custom-text-to-speech-tts-voices/

About ReadSpeaker:

ReadSpeaker is the most trusted independent digital voice partner for global brands, institutions, and organizations. With over 20 years’ experience, ReadSpeaker’s AI-powered text-to-speech solutions and expert assistance enhance the accessibility of digital content and enable more user-friendly and engaging interactions with technology. The company’s flexible cloud and on-premise solutions bring over 110 expressive, humanlike synthetic voices in more than 35 languages to any application or device. The company consistently maintains its uncompromising commitment to data privacy and has so far speech enabled over 10,000 voice applications worldwide.

ReadSpeaker’s digital voice design brand, readspeaker.com, helps agencies, integrators, and developers to enhance CX and drive sales through consistently engaging, on-brand interactions across touchpoints. For more information, go to readspeaker.com and follow the company on Twitter and LinkedIn.

ReadSpeaker contact

Gaea Vilage

Marketing Director NA & EMEA, readspeaker.ai

gaea.vilage@readspeaker.com