Scansoft gets Bill Clinton to speak his last will and testament

IN A DRAMATIC demonstration of the power inherent in its latest Realspeak text to speech engine, Scansoft's Jan De Moortel gave a demo of former US President, Bill Clinton, giving an entire contrived speech.

The results were clearly recognisable as Bill Clinton and would have sounded entirely realistic save his pronunciation of Scansoft.

Spookily, De Moortel revealed that the results had been achieved by sampling a mere 15 minutes worth of a genuine Clinton speech downloaded from the Internet. The company now possesses the ability to automatically feed in a new voice - such as Clinton's and the whole process was less than a half day's work.

The technology could potentially save Hollywood a fortune. If faced with another disaster such as Oliver Reed dying half way through the filming of Gladiator, they could sample Reed's voice, hire a body double and his character would have spoken the script perfectly!

Scansoft is apparently toying with the idea of building the voices for other US Presidents. Will Richard Nixon now say the immortal words, "I am a crook?" µ

Tony Dennis had to ride the entire distance from AIX to Ghent, like Childe Rolande, to get this story. He tells us that Scansoft holed him and other hacks up in a windowless room. What else happened there? We're in the dark about that...

L'INQ
US Presidents