Table of Contents

About ProVoice for Windows

Application Programming Interface

About First Byte

License Information

Ordering ProVoice for Windows


About First Byte

First Byte, located in Torrance, California, is a software development company dedicated to creating audio technologies and high quality educational and productivity software for microcomputers.

First Byte actively licenses its patented speech technology to interested OEMs.  General purpose computer OEMs, dedicated processor OEMs, government entities and software publishers are all representative of First Byte customer licensees.

Today, text-to-speech integration interest is extremely high.  Generally, the applications fall into the following classes:

Alert messages:	Notification that an action is required by the operator.
Data proofreading:	Improving the accuracy of your correspondence and spreadsheets.
Information/Help/Tutorial messages:	Status of computer operations or other system activity
Remote access to personal data:	Ability to dial-up your computer from a telephone and obtain computer data such as phone numbers, E-mail, calendar events and other on-line database information.

First Byte consistently allocates substantial resources to the improvement of our text-to-speech solutions.  In the future our valued customers and prospects can expect to receive improved speech quality versions, foreign language implementations, and computer processor platform support.  Our multimedia product focus will continue to create value-adding technologies for the computer industry.


Ordering ProVoice/Windows

ProVoice sells for $595  (see License Information).You may order ProVoice by calling

1-(800) 523-2983

or by mailing in our ProVoice Order Form.


License Agreement Information

After purchasing ProVoice for Windows, you may include the appropriate files with your application with each of your approved applications.  You may distribute them royalty free up to a certain financial revenue and/or certain number of units.  Please call (800) 523-2983 for further information on Commercial Product Distribution Licensing.


Application Programming Interface

ProVoice for Windows includes a DLL interface allowing most Windows programming languages to speak free-form English text.

The Speech Engine is a concurrent Windows task. This means that your program continues to run while speech is in progress. (Windows 3.1 doesn't have pre-emptive multitasking so certain restrictions exist to concurrent behavior).

ProVoice supports multiple simultaneous speech Clients. Requests to the Speech Engine are serialized on a FIFO basis.

Real-time synchronization of mouth movement and word boundaries to speech-in-progress is supported through Windows message passing. This allows animation of graphical talking characters, or highlighting of displayed text as it is spoken.

An Exception Dictionary allows you to save your own preferred pronunciations of words and abbreviations. The speech API allows each Client task to browse and edit its dictionary.


ProVoice for Windows

The Developer's Speech ToolKit

ProVoice makes is easy for programmers to add synthesized speech to their Windows applications. Your program simply passes text strings to a Speech DLL, which translates the text into audible speech.

Virtually all types of software, from educational programs to sales tools, can benefit from the use of synthesized speech technology. Speech aids young readers and writers, keeps a child's attention, provides positive reinforcement, and allows for talking help. With talking demos, customers and employees will clearly hear and listen to a product's message, as opposed to reading text on the computer. Synthesized speech is more flexible than digitized speech because it will speak any text string without having to record and prepare each speech phrase. It also requires much less disk space than digitized speech.

All of the necessary tools and examples are provided for programmers to manipulate the ProVoice speech technology with ease. Installation instructions, extensive sample programs, and a wealth of creative ideas for use are all included in the comprehensive manual. In addition, sample source code is provided on disk to illustrate speech programming techniques in most popular languages.

ProVoice for Windows can be used with all Windows 3.1 supported wave audio devices such as the Soundblaster or ProAudio Spectrum cards.