Digium and Cepstral Announce Text-To-Speech Partnership for Linux Telephony

PITTSBURGH, PA and HUNTSVILLE, AL -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 06/06/2005 -- Digium and Cepstral announced a partnership agreement today to provide Cepstral Swift Text-To-Speech (TTS) languages and voices for Digium's Linux telephony platforms and applications. Under the arrangement, Cepstral becomes a Digium Premier Partner for providing commercial Text-To-Speech.

The offering will include Cepstral's telephony voices, David, Diane and William for U.S. English, as well as options for U.K. English, German, Canadian French, American Spanish, and Italian, for use in multi-channel applications on the Linux operating system. Each will be available from Digium, and incorporated into key products and services.

"Cepstral voices allow our customers to introduce high quality Text-To-Speech into telephone and IP telephony applications that use dynamic content. These voices sound great and provide the flexibility to deliver information over the phone, or on the network," said Mark Spencer, CEO of Digium and primary author of the Asterisk PBX.

"Digium is a proven pioneer who's development of the Asterisk PBX has created a powerful and practical platform for computer-telephony integration," said Kevin Lenzo, CEO and co-founder of Cepstral, LLC. "We are very happy to partner with the company that is spearheading the Linux telephony movement. Our new server-based voices fit the offering perfectly and bring extraordinary vocal quality at an extremely competitive price."

Digium's products and services featuring the Cepstral Swift TTS voices will be available in June of 2005.

About Cepstral, LLC

Cepstral is a speech technology company based in Pittsburgh, PA, USA, which provides speech technologies and services for the spoken delivery of information. Cepstral builds high quality, natural sounding voices for server, desktop, and hand-held applications. Cepstral also provides professional services to customize and tune voices. Cepstral: We Build Voices.

About Digium

Digium is the creator and primary developer of Asterisk, the industry's first Open Source PBX. Used in combination with Digium's PCI telephony interface cards, Asterisk offers a strategic, highly cost-effective approach to voice and data transport over TDM, switched, and Ethernet architectures. Digium solutions reduce the costs of traditional implementations of PBX, IVR, media gateway, and communications servers through open source, standards-based software and innovative hardware solutions. Digium also offers technical support and development services for Asterisk, and commercial versions such as Asterisk Business Edition, a professional-grade distribution of the acclaimed open-source software.