Founded in October of 1984, CommPower specializes in the development and deployment of secure and reliable message handling systems and gateways as well as unique systems solutions to real world problems. CommPower creates solutions for the United States Defense Department, NATO allies, the National Weather Service (NWS), the FAA, the U.S. intelligence community, European and Canadian prime government contractors. Headquartered in Camarillo, CA, CommPower maintains a technical support office in Dublin, Ireland, providing local assistance to their customers in Western Europe.

"CommPower has spent the past 12 years in the TTS arena. We have used hardware TTS solutions and several TTS software solutions," said Chuck Purcell, Vice President Operations / TTS Projects for CommPower. "AT&T's Natural Voices is superior in voice quality and ability to customize word pronunciation."

"Wizzard's responsiveness in delivery of product and with technical issues has allowed CommPower to provide a level of service to our end-user's not previously experienced," added Purcell.

CTBS runs on a desktop or server PC (Windows 2K and XP) that would typically connect to the customer's local area network. The primary function of CTBS is to read ASCII text messages from pre-defined directories and convert the ASCII text messages into high quality digitized voice (WAV) files using AT&T's Natural Voices TTS engine. The digitized (WAV) files are stored in their respective directories and subsequently scheduled for broadcast (output) to internal voice processing boards and/or transferred to external destinations (via the local area network).

CTBS assigns a separate server process to each of the available voice types (English, Spanish, German, French, Korean). The individual server processes allow CTBS to successfully perform simultaneous ASCII-to-WAV file conversions. For each ASCII text message, a client process is initialized that communicates with the applicable (language, gender) server process. When conversion is complete the applicable client process is terminated.

"We are excited to have had CommPower choose Wizzard to supply AT&T Natural Voices for CTBS. CommPower's products strongly showcase the versatility and quality of Natural Voices," said Danielle Lewis, Marketing Director for Wizzard Software. "We strive to provide our customers with the best level of service possible, and we're pleased that CommPower was able to benefit from that."

About CommPower:

CommPower designed, developed, manufactured and fielded the TTS weather broadcast system (known as CRS) for the U.S. National Weather Service, installed at over 120 locations and is the backbone system for the U.S. NOAA Weather Radio. CommPower has also provided the TTS broadcast system for the U.S. Coast Guard Rescue 21 program, Canadian Coast Guard Continuous Marine Broadcast system and various commercial companies. For more information, visit www.commpower.com, or contact Chuck Purcell by phone (805-389-7414) or e-mail: cjpurcell@commpower.com