CereProc (short for 'Cerebral Processing') was founded in late 2005 by speech synthesis expert Dr Matthew Aylett, and Nick Wright of the Edinburgh-Stanford Link speech research fund. They made the decision after lamenting the lack of innovation by speech technology companies around the world.
The pair realised that the latest advances in speech synthesis now meant artificial voices could not only be made to sound 'real', but could also be built quickly and cost effectively. If a company could harness these developments, it could create a range of voices for a whole new era of exciting applications. Finally, when combined with major advances in speech recognition, a number of killer applications, long talked about but never realised, could finally become a reality.
In January 2006, CereProc's novel ideas were assessed by the Scottish Government and the company was awarded a GBP50,000 research grant. It immediately approached Chris Pidcock, a world-class speech synthesis expert, with unique expertise in the voice building process.
In April 2006 Paul Welham joined as Chief Executive Officer. Paul, ex-Director of Sales and Marketing for a leading speech solutions provider, immediately saw the potential for CereProc's world beating technology. Paul has gone about building key relationships with academic and commercial partners across Europe.
Since then, CereProc has achieved double and triple-digit year-on-year growth, adding products for home users to our range of developer-centric tools, and expanding into speech servers and web services.