The company said Speechify's speech output bears "a remarkable resemblance to a natural voice."

Speechify Solo can be used in applications such as in-vehicle entertainment and systems, voice-interactive automated teller machines, voice-activated telephone dialing, etc., the company said.

"Microsoft has selected Speechify as the TTS engine for the Microsoft Speech platform due to its ability to support high quality, natural sounding synthetic speech in multiple languages," commented James Mastan, Director of Marketing, Microsoft Speech Technologies Group at Microsoft.

Samples of Speechworks voices are here.