Ivona’s technology was licensed to major companies:
As noted in some community sources, legacy versions of the voice might still appear in demonstrations for older speech technology products. Eric vs. Modern Neural TTS Voices eric ivona text to speech
It is important to note that TTS technology has evolved rapidly. While Eric was incredible for his time, he is now considered a "Standard" voice. Ivona’s technology was licensed to major companies: As
The legacy of Eric Ivona paved the way for the current era of "Neural" TTS. While Eric was a leader in concatenative synthesis (using fragments of recorded speech), today’s AI uses deep learning to generate speech from scratch. While newer neural voices offer even more emotional range, Eric remains a nostalgic and highly functional benchmark for what a professional digital voice should sound like. While Eric was incredible for his time, he
In January 2013, Amazon acquired IVONA Software to power its Kindle ecosystem and expand its cloud capabilities. This acquisition eventually led to the birth of Amazon Polly in late 2016. While many flagship IVONA voices migrated directly into Amazon's cloud architecture, Eric has a unique history. He was officially retired from Amazon's primary development line in 2017, meaning he was never natively grandfathered directly into standard Polly engines like Salli or Joey .
If you are looking to generate audio using the exact Eric IVONA voice profile, a handful of desktop solutions, developer APIs, and online TTS suites still host his portfolio.
Educational publishers used Eric to turn physical textbooks into audio files quickly.