What do software development, education, and a cause initiative have in common? How important is the human factor and the pure, selfless need to help? The answers to these fundamental questions lie in one of the many significant projects for Astea that we are often shy to talk about.
Two of our most experienced developers – Ivaylo Sachanski and Georgi Angelov – are part of the NeuralSpeechLab team – a Bulgarian speech synthesizer for the needs of people with visual impairments. The software product was implemented by the Institute of Information and Communication Technologies at the BAS, and Astea created its integration with Android and Windows devices.
The project was created for the Union of the Blind in Bulgaria, with the aim of facilitating the daily life of people with visual problems. According to BAS studies, it is currently the best fully offline program in the world for synthesized Bulgarian speech. After years of development, the software has a unique neural architecture for determining accents in Bulgarian texts. Over 1.3 million word forms used for spelling correction and over 60 thousand words for pronunciation of English words in text. What makes NeuralSpeechLab different from all other products in the field is the fact that the synthesized speech occurs in real time on mid-range mobile phones and PCs, and its sound is virtually indistinguishable from natural speech.
The uniqueness of the project, according to our colleagues, lies in beta testing and receiving first-hand feedback throughout its development. Ivaylo and Georgi share that they were extremely motivated to cooperate with Prof. Stoyan Mihov’s team, as the end result will help many people to improve their quality of life. The emotional element in the creation of NeuralSpeechLab is of significant value to them, because: “seeing the gratitude and sincere joy on the faces of the users using the application is priceless”, both are categorical.
This is not the first initiative with a cause for Astea – the company believes that creating quality software to help people is a key factor in developing both as professionals and as people.
