The speech technology company Bitlips has released the most natural sounding Welsh-language synthetic voice yet, called ‘Owen’. The voice is based on resources developed as part of the WISPR project undertaken by the Language Technologies Unit at Bangor University, but uses Hidden Markov Model techniques rather than the diphone method used by the voices produced at Bangor. The Owen voice is now available for licensing from Bitlips for commercial use, and you can hear a demonstration of the voice on this website powered by ReadSpeaker’s speech enabling service by selecting Welsh from the language selector found on the top right of the page (under the Bangor University logo) and clicking on the ‘Gwrando’ button at the top of the article.

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