Press Release

HONG KONG, October 29, 2020 – InfoTalk Corporation Limited, a leader in conversational artificial intelligence technologies, today announced winning the Gold Award from the Hong Kong ICT Awards for its flagship product, InfoTalk-Speaker 10.0.  This Version 10 leapfrogs text-to-speech technology to a new frontier, enabling computers, robots, and any automated systems to speak in natural human voices like those in sci-fi movies.

Powered by artificial intelligence, machine learning, speech science, phonetics, and linguistics, InfoTalk-Speaker obsoletes all text-to-speech products that sound mechanic and monotonic. It opens up a whole new horizon for uncharted waters of digital applications.

InfoTalk-Speaker is available in multiple languages. It speaks with the tonal precision of human native speakers of Cantonese and Putonghua. It articulates with the prosody of human English speakers. For words with pronunciation alternatives, it speaks the correct pronunciation according to the linguistic context. It even knows special Cantonese characters not found in dictionaries.

Humans in multilingual societies mix different languages as they speak. InfoTalk-Speaker speaks languages interchangeably in the very same voice, much like local Hong Kong residents mixing Cantonese and English words when they speak. “InfoTalk-Speaker is a text-to-speech product well-tuned for the Cantonese dialect commonly used in Hong Kong,” commended the Judging Panel. “The mixing of English is well supported and it is widely accepted in many industry and public sectors.”

“Sci-fi movies make young technologies dream about the future,” said Dr. Zachary Leung, CEO of InfoTalk Corporation.  He was inspired by sci-fi movies, which led him to become a PhD and scientist in the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the MIT Speech Group.  “The DNA and perseverance of the InfoTalk team make dreams come true.” 

“The technological breakthrough today benefits from meticulous research results accumulated over thousands of years since human civilization,” said Dr. Leung. “However, our achievement is nothing compared to the creation that gives humans the physical and cognitive capabilities to speak freely.  How did the Creator design humans?”

Leading corporations and organizations use InfoTalk-Speaker for mission-critical applications.  It is ideal for a variety of voice and language solutions, such as AI chatbots, voicebots, speech analytics, virtual assistants, virtual receptionists, virtual kiosks, talking robots, e-books, intelligent IVR systems, and public announcements in a wide range of industries, including telecommunications, finance, banking, transportation, betting, entertainment, government, real estate, logistics, utilities, travel, and tourism.

InfoTalk-Speaker is one of the core products in the award-winning InfoTalk-RSVP family: (1) InfoTalk-Recognizer for speech-to-text and speech recognition; (2) InfoTalk-Speaker for text-to-speech; (3) InfoTalk-Vbrowser for intelligent IVR; and (4) InfoTalk-Processor for natural language processing. Depending on the application, InfoTalk-Speaker can be deployed with or without other InfoTalk-RSVP products.  For demonstrations, visit www.infotalkcorp.com/text-to-speech-TTS.

The Hong Kong ICT Awards was established in 2006 with the collaborative efforts of the industry, academia and the Government.  Steered by the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer, and organized by Hong Kong ICT industry associations and professional bodies, the Awards aims at building a locally espoused and internationally acclaimed brand of ICT awards.