The Nikkei Business Daily reports that Kenwood Corporation plans to offer car navigation systems in 2004 that deliver road directions by using synthetic voices that sound far more natural than the robotic voices now in use.

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The company announced on Monday that it would license an advanced voice-synthesis technology from the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR).


The ATR’s proprietary voice-synthesis technology is a corpus-based system that can generate natural-sounding speech patterns by using voice dictionaries created from the recordings of people reading.


Kenwood will combine the ATR’s technology with its own digital-signal-processing technology to give its car navigation systems natural-sounding voices.

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