Chant Inc., a leading independent vendor of speech technology tools and components, announced today availability of an updated version of its flagship toolset for developing software that speaks and listens..

Chant Developer Workbench is comprised of essential tools and components for integrating speech technology. It provides developers a comprehensive application development framework for expanding modality and integrating speech technology. Developers now can manage grammars, profiles, lexicons, recognizers, synthesizers, and text-to-speech markup interactively and directly within application software they develop and deploy with Microsoft Speech Platform v11.0.

“Microsoft Speech Platform enables a lot of application scenarios with its rich multilingual support,” said John Earle, president and founder of Chant Inc. “With Developer Workbench 2011, developers have the flexibility to integrate speech technology once and have the flexibility to utilize this technology and others in the same application.”

New key features and capabilities provided by Chant Developer Workbench 2011 include:
• Enumerate and select Microsoft Speech Platform v10.0, v10.1, v10.2 or v11.0 recognizers and voices without binding applications to a specific version,
• Enumerate and select other speech technologies in the same applications,
• Develop applications in a variety of programming languages and environments such as C++, C++Builder, Delphi, Java, JavaScript, NET Web Forms, .NET WPF, and Silverlight,
• Build and deploy 32-bit and 64-bit multilingual applications, and
• Leverage the comprehensive Chant Developer Workbench interactive development environment for designing and testing speech recognition grammars, building and packaging pronunciation lexicons, and creating and testing SSML.

US Pricing and Availability
Chant Developer Workbench 2011 can be ordered today. Pricing is $999 per developer and includes the Chant Developer Workbench interactive environment, a license for GrammarKit 4, LexiconKit 4, ProfileKit 4, SpeechKit 7, and VoiceMarkupKit 4. For more information about features and pricing, visit www.developerworkbench.com.