The world leader in computerization of Hebrew - Hebrew search, Hebrew search engine, Hebrew morphology, Hebrew stemmer, Hebrew translation, Hebrew-English Cross-Language Search, Hebrew Machine Translation, Hebrew Linguistics, Hebrew computational linguistics, Hebrew Natural Language Processing, Hebrew NLP, Hebrew Dictionaries, Hebrew Text to Speech, Hebrew speech recognition
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   
 
 
   
       
 
 
 

 

  
 

Kolan is a development of over ten years, satisfying the need of a Hebrew Text-to-Speech program. Hebrew text poses two main problems for a TTS module:

1. The text is ambiguous. E.g. the words "HIFNIM" (grasped), "HAPANIM" (the face) and "HAPNIM" (the interior) are all written exactly the same; KOLAN has a special disambiguation module that resolves this problem with a very high degree of accuracy.

2. The number of words is huge; due to inflections, Hebrew has more than 70 million words! Just one verb can be inflected in up to 10,000 forms. KOLAN includes the MILIM morphological analyzer that correctly handles each and every form that exists in the language.

Technical Specifications:
KOLAN is available both in its own API or as a SAPI (Microsoft Speech API) compliant speech-font.
KOLAN permits simultaneous activity on multiple channels (up to 32 on a single Pentium III server,)

Linguistic Specifications:
97% correct vocalization of Hebrew text. Near 100% correct stress placement Natural intonation patterns Correct reading of English text, numbers, URL's, etc.

Applications:
The most important application for TTS is in telephony. KOLAN is incorporated into added- value applications in telephony, chiefly to enable voice access to e- mail messages and appointment books. Voice access is most important for on-the-go situations, where the user's eyes cannot be set on the screen of his or her mobile phone.
KOLAN is, of course, dramatically useful to people with learning and reading disabilities. For the blind, Kolan is incorporated into all speech enabled products produced by the leading supplier of tools for the blind and visually impaired - Tesher Gaash. It also offers a solution for users of alternative communications, who cannot speak in their own voices but wish for their words to be heard in Hebrew.
The SAPI compliance enables KOLAN to be used in conjunction with the leading screen reading and alternative communication products.

Future
KOLAN's morphological and syntactic analysis and disambiguation modules are applicable to languages where there is a problem of rich morphology and ambiguity. Melingo plans to duplicate the success of KOLAN to such languages.