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Originally Posted by kgn1224
I reviewed some old theads for iLane but didn't see any feedback. The device is not cheap, but does anyone have any hands on experience to confirm it works as well as advertised? Does anyone have experience with other comparable alternatives?
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Hi KGN.
I have plenty of hands-on experience with iLane and can confirm that it works quite well.
I will admit that I work for the Waterloo company IMS (that made iLane). I was hired to upgrade news and content features so I'm partial to our TTS capabilities.
Voice recognition works amazingly well compared to anything I've used before.
Text-to-speech is tricky business and ours has a nice collection of inflections. It goes for more of a 'realistic' speech pattern that attempts to convey emotion with more human sounding sentences. That's opposed to a rather than a mono-tone synth speech like you'd hear from other text-to-speech products.
That said the TTS engine does get inflections wrong sometimes which can sound unreal or even humorous at times. But when it's bang-on it's uncanny. Sure there are places where we can improve, such as compatibility with more cell-phones, more versions of BB OS but that's coming.
Since I am directly involved in the TTS engine I can proudly say there are massive improvements coming soon to speech. Not only an upgraded and tweaked version of our Loquendo TTS engine is going to roll-out soon.
User experience is a huge priority and we're really working to provide smooth speech when iLane reads both email and news. I think it's safe to say that the upcoming version of our TTS engine could well be the most sophisticated being used anywhere in the world.
I'm excited about the project and although it's quite impressive now - hearing iLane read your email and news stories will knock your socks off in the near future.
There are many fair reviews to be found online if you Google iLane.
iLane: Does anyone have experience with this?
