Frontier's David Braben Appointed To Board At Speech Tech House

David Braben renowned developer of Elite, and more recently the WiiWare game LostWinds, has joined the board at Phonetic Arts, a middleware developer specializing in expressive speech in games, the company said Tuesday. "Having spent a lot of time with the guys at Phonetic Arts I’m really excited at the potential offered by their technology," Braben said in a statement. The game maker is currently chairman of LostWinds developer Frontier Developments. "In-game dialogue has come a long way but there’s still so much it can accomplish. I believe that the team at Phonetic Arts has a compelling product that will add new depth to games," he added. Today, in-game speech is primarily comprised of recordings from voice actors. But Phonetic Arts said it has created technology that utilizes a "speech synthesis engine and voice development environment," which allow for dynamic presentation of speech in a game to better suit unique virtual situations. The company claimed, "The speech produced is completely natural and will for the first time enable games developers to generate voice content which matches the high quality of other parts of the games." The Cambridge, UK-based company has been around since 2006, and was founded by Paul Taylor, Ian Hodson, and Anthony Tomlinson.