PITTSBURGH, PA -- (Marketwire) -- 04/08/09 -- Cepstral LLC, the largest privately held text-to-speech (TTS) company in North America, today announced successful integration of their TTS engine with enabling technology from Aculab, a leading provider of media processing hardware and software.

Using the standards-based MRCP protocol, Cepstral's TTS voices are now 'plug-and-play' with Aculab's line of DSP boards (Prosody X) and Host Media Processing (HMP) software (Prosody S). The partnership brings affordable high-quality speech to Aculab's voice and data service offerings, including interactive voice response (IVR), automated alerts and notifications, auto-attendant, talking email and unified messaging.

"The relationship was formed with the end-customer in mind," said Cepstral's CEO Craig Campbell. "Typically, hardware manufacturers and component software like TTS are at opposite ends of the telephony ecosystem. Nonetheless, a customer will expect all the layers to work together. Careful interoperability ('interop') testing ensures that our combined products can deliver the expected functionality with the greatest of ease."

"Cepstral's voices exemplify value-added 3rd party technology," said Product Manager Andrew Nicholson. "Aculab's Prosody lines provide a powerful media processing base. With the addition of Cepstral's TTS voices, customers can leverage this base to perform automated tasks, personalization, and achieve greater flexibility for information delivery."

"Aculab is a very knowledgeable partner," Campbell added. "Its Prosody X boards can handle high-density call flows in an impressive list of different signal formats. Its expertise with media processing is evident by their international presence and wide range of applications, from enterprise to government and small businesses. We are pleased to link Cepstral voices to Aculab's line of products."

About Cepstral

Cepstral is a text-to-speech technology company which provides software and services for the spoken delivery of information. Cepstral builds high-quality, natural sounding voices for server, desktop, and embedded applications (www.cepstral.com). VoiceForge is a SaaS platform powered by Cepstral dedicated to online delivery of a wide variety of professional and novelty voices (www.voiceforge.com/demo). We Make the Internet Talk®

This press release can also be viewed on Aculab's website here (http://www.aculab.com/news-and-events/)

About Aculab

Aculab enables developers and systems integrators to produce a variety of high-performance communications solutions. Aculab's portfolio offers an exceptional mix of capabilities that are easy to integrate and bring real value -- reduced costs, increased customer satisfaction and competitive advantage. A complete range of open standards building block technologies for use within telco or enterprise environments, as well as essential support services, are offered. Products include media resources, digital network access, VoIP, fax, speech processing and conferencing. Support is available to help developers through each stage of their product's life cycle including pre-sales consultancy, technical support, training and marketing.

Aculab's head office is located in Milton Keynes, UK with offices in the USA, Germany and Australia.