Kindle Text-to-Speech Dissected: Part 3 - Corporate History

As mentioned in previous articles, TTS has followed a long and winding road, with as many as 50 companies vying for the ultimate prize: a machine that can speak as well as a human.  Over the past 5 years or so, the computer speech industry has consolidated to 4 major companies, which has given an opportunity for a new round of speech-related startups to take a shot at the prize. So far, no TTS technology (without pre-set phrases) has been able to fool a human, but advances in technology have a funny way of 'popping' up all of a sudden.

There have been many colorful figures in TTS’ history, and this series of articles will take a closer look at a few starting with an in-depth interview with one of the key TTS figures in the last 25 years.  But first, a timeline of sorts is required to establish a temporal context on which the rest of the TTS historical articles can be based.  With that, the following is a list of companies, name changes, and acquisitions that have led to the TTS technology found in the Kindle today.

1939	Bell Labs' VODER is displayed at the 1939 World's Fair
1946	Stanford Research Institute founded
1958	IBM funds speech research
1958	G. Peterson, W. Wang, and E. Sivertsen produce speech using diphones
1961	IBM Text-to-Speech team formed, including Dr. Michael H. O'Malley
1962	John L. Kelly at Bell Labs uses an IBM 704 to 'sing'
1970	Xerox PARC research facility opened
1971	Cecil H. Coker at Bell Labs converts printed text into speech
1974	Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc. is founded by Dr. Ray Kurtzweil to develop character recognition software for any font.
1979	Berkeley Speech Technologies (Text to Speech, Speech Recognition) founded by Dr. Michael H. O'Malley
1980	Xerox purchases Kurzweil Computer Products and runs it as Xerox Imaging Systems (1990-1999), and later as ScanSoft (1999+)
1982	Dragon Systems founded by husband and wife team Dr. James and Janet Baker
1983	Speech Technology and Research (STAR) Laboratory founded as a spinoff of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI)
1983	Eloquent Technology founded in Ithaca, NY by Dr.Susan Hertz
1987	Lernout & Hauspie founded in Belgium by Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie
1992	Visioneer (Scanner hardware and software) founded by Dr. Denis R. Coleman
1994	Nuance Founded as a spinoff of SRI's STAR lab (originally called Corona)
1994	ALTech founded by Mike Phillips
1994	Phonetic Systems founded
1996	Lernout & Hauspie acquires Berkeley Speech Technologies
1997-1998	Lernout & Hauspie acquire an additional 16 speech-related companies
1998	Lernout & Hauspie acquires Kurzweil Applied Intelligence
1998	AT&T Launches their Next-Generation TTS, later renamed AT&T Natural Voices
1998	ALTech renamed to SpeechWorks
1999	Visioneer purchases ScanSoft from Xerox and adopts ScanSoft as a company-wide name
1999	Lernout & Hauspie develops RealSpeak; the TTS system that would eventually make its way into the Kindle
2000	Lernout & Hauspie acquires Dragon Systems
2000	SpeechWorks Inc. acquires Eloquent Technologies
2000	Rhetorical Systems Inc. founded in Edinborough, Scotland
2001	ScanSoft acquires Lernout & Hauspie's Speech and Language division
2003	ScanSoft acquires Philips Speech Processing division
2003	ScanSoft acquires SpeechWorks Inc.
2004	ScanSoft acquires Rhetorical Systems Ltd.
2005	ScanSoft acquires Phonetic Systems Ltd.
2005	ScanSoft merges with Nuance and changes company-wide name to Nuance
2006-2009	Nuance acquires an additional 20 speech-related companies
2008	Amazon selects Nuance technologies' RealSpeak to provide TTS in Kindles
2009	Amazon releases the Kindle 2 and DX with TTS

A [rough] graphical version of the Timeline is available here.

Look for the next Kindicted article in the TTS series: an interview with...someone named on the above list!  Until then, happy reading!