IVR

ROK Entertainment Group, the U.K.-based mobile applications and services provider, reportedly has acquired text-to-speech provider Textic.

 

ROK officials said that the Textic services, originally designed to automatically convert typed words on websites into audible speech in real-time, will be further developed for mobile phones and eBooks and will be re-launched as ROK Talk.

 

“The acquisition of Textic represents an enormous opportunity on many levels, not least for the benefit of the blind or partially sighted, but also for the under-educated and illiterate as well as the millions of people affected by dyslexia worldwide,” said Jonathan Kendrick, chairman and CEO of ROK.

 

Kendrick said that there are many educational benefits through text-to-speak particularly in regard to learning English as a second language. Additionally, in the United States it law under the Americans with Disabilities Act for all government-based and commercial web sites to offer text-to-speech functionality. Similar obligations are expected to become law in the U.K. and across Europe in the near future.

 

“Being acquired by ROK, with their global sales and marketing reach, will provide a massive boost to the deployment of text-to-talk services worldwide,” said David Shickle, vice president of Textic, “and we look forward to adding new versions of our website reader technologies for the mobile phone and eBooks under the ROK Talk banner going-forward.”

 

“I am hugely enthusiastic about this service as I am personally committed to enabling the visually-impaired and those who cannot read to become empowered, as much as possible, through internet and mobile phone technologies. ROK Talk will do exactly that on a global scale,” said John Paul DeJoria, co-founder of ROK and founder of John Paul Mitchell Systems and Patron Tequila.

 

Founded in 2004, ROK Entertainment Group is a mobile technologies, applications and services development company with a suite of revenue-generating mobile services which it licenses to mobile operators and handset manufacturers worldwide

In October ROK Entertainment Group and Claro (News - Alert), Dominican Republic, a mobile operator in Dominican Republic, had announced the launch of Ideas TV, a streamed, live and pre-recorded mobile TV subscription service.

 

Powered by ROK’s over-the-air video-streaming technologies, Ideas TV will offer an initial package of 11 local and international channels including Cadena de Noticias, ESPN (News - Alert), ESPN X, TV Azteca, Discovery Movil, MTV, Disney Channel, History Channel and National Geographic, Nickelodeon, Discover Kids and Playboy Lifestyle.

 

Initially the service will be available on the BlackBerry (News - Alert) Bold, Nokia N95, Nokia E71 and the Nokia 6120.