SVOX and Microsoft will join forces to provide speech for in-vehicle communication, entertainment, information and navigation products. 

This new generation of in-car speech solutions will be designed to meet the automotive industry's growing demand for multilingual high quality text-to-speech solutions.

The SVOX-Microsoft collaboration will enable the partners to turn around projects much faster than the typical automotive industry's product development cycle.

The latest Microsoft Auto 3.0 SDK with SVOX text-to-speech is available now.

Martin Thall, general manager of Microsoft's Automotive Business Unit, commented: "Our expertise in software for multimedia, entertainment and communications solutions in combination with SVOX's long years of speech technology experience forms the ideal basis for a successful collaboration."

He added that SVOX has highly recognised know-how in the design of speech solutions for infotainment systems and the company's responsiveness and customer focus are unmatched in the industry.

"SVOX has pioneered the development of mixed-lingual speech technology, which enables for example an English voice to read the name of a Spanish city or a French street with proper pronunciation," said Thall. "This is particularly useful for navigation applications where names often originate from a variety of different languages and mispronunciations can lead to an unpleasant user experience."

"We are pleased that SVOX is part of Microsoft Auto 3.0 as our speech technology partner," said Martin Thall. "The extremely flexible and modular nature of our offerings makes it perfectly suited to provide a range of innovative infotainment solutions that transform the user experience by connecting drivers seamlessly to the people, information and entertainment they care about while keeping their hands on the wheel and eyes on the road."

SVOX's CEO, Volker Jantzen, said that the partnership will enable the companies to incorporate the rapidly changing trends in consumer electronics into the world of automotive electronics in a meaningful way.

"Working together, we will deliver a new breed of speech technology-enabled vehicle generations," he concluded."