Amazon Has Bought IVONA Software, To Beat Apple’s Siri?

While Amazon’s Kindle Fire already has this software, which enable’s the ‘Text to Speech’, ‘Voice Commands’ and ‘Explore by Touch’ features in it, it has now bought IVONA. This implies that Amazon is interested in improving the quality of it’s devices, and is not only working on reading tablets, but perhaps on devices that would rival Apple’s iPad and Samsung’s tablets, or maybe even a phone, nut that’s unconfirmed.

“IVONA’s exceptional text-to-speech technology leads the industry in natural voice quality, accuracy and ease of use. IVONA is already instrumental in helping us deliver excellent accessibility features on Kindle Fire, including Text-to-Speech, Voice Guide, and Explore by Touch,” said Dave Limp, the Vice President of Amazon Kindle. “The IVONA team shares our passion for innovation and customer obsession, and we look forward to building great products to deliver world-class voice solutions to customer’s around the world.”

And it looks like the IVONA team is also pretty happy with this move. “For more than ten years, the IVONA team has been focused on creating innovative Text-to-Speech technologies,” said Lukasz Osowski, the CEO and Co-Founder of IVONA. “We are all thrilled that Amazon is supporting our growth so that we can continue to innovate and deliver exceptional voice and language support for our customers.” IVONA provides it’s technological services in 44 voices, in 17 languages.