Namaste India! Introducing Vidhi, Acapela’s new Hindi female voice, based on AI.

Acapela Group,  leading voice technology expert, is pleased to unveil its new Hindi voice, Vidhi, to meet the demand for a high-quality and natural-sounding text-to-speech voice across India.

A wide audience to serve. Hindi is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, after Mandarin, Spanish, and English. It is the most widely spoken language in India, with over 500 million speakers. The digital age in India is advancing rapidly, and so is the demand for speech interfaces. The adoption of synthetic voices in services and applications enhances the level of assistance in the daily lives of Indian people across the country, improving their user experience, supporting education, providing easier and equal access to information, and enhancing inclusivity for all.

A great new challenge to reach. Hindi is – by far – the largest of the 22 languages in India,  also known as “scheduled languages”. Next to English, it is the official language of multilingual country’s businesses and parliament. It is spoken by over 50% of the Indian population as the first or second language. Hindi is closely related to other Indo-European languages spoken in India, such as Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi and other and its development for text-to-speech is a powerful start to pave the multilingual ways of the Indian peninsular in Acapela’s language technologies. Devanagari script, nasal vowels, short and long ones, aspirated and retroflex consonants, grammatical inflections, we welcomed all of it!

 

The Acapela new Hindi voice is the result of extensive and enthusiastic work by Acapela’s language and speech technologists who have been striving to create a voice that accurately conveys the nuances and complexities of the Hindi language. It is based on the latest neural technology, generating speech that is clear, natural-sounding, and easy to understand.

“Speech-enabled interfaces provide easy access to applications and services, making digital content easily accessible to all. It enables populations in semi-urban and rural parts of India to access a wide range of services and information on essential topics such as health, education, passenger information, and much more. Enriching our portfolio with this new Hindi voice is undoubtedly a milestone,” says Remy Cadic, CEO of Acapela Group.