Red Weather Technologies researches biomechanical simulation for commercial applications. The firm is currently investigating articulatory speech synthesis. The goal is to generate realistic speech with customizable voices. Synthesized speech is used in varied applications ranging from consumer PC interfaces to telephone customer services. There are also many potential applications, such as video games, audio books, animation and podcasting, that require better quality speech than is now available. Current generation speech synthesizers produce speech more or less by gluing together speech snippets from pre-recorded voices. These "cut and paste" methods create sounds that are not entirely natural and have distracting glitches and distortions. Due to constraints inherent in the technology, these products provide the customer with a limited repertoire of voices and no ability to customize voices and change tone. Articulatory speech synthesis simulates the physics of speech production including the movements of the lips, tongue, jaw, and vocal cords and the acoustics of the vocal tract. This technology addresses the limitations of existing commercial speech synthesis systems in a variety of markets
