How can a global, non-profit organization deliver voice-enabled magazines, e-books, e-learning, and pronunciation guides in hundreds of languages while ensuring that specialized terms are pronounced correctly?

Centific answered this question by creating an AI-powered system that combines human expertise with scalable technology, enabling accurate, natural-sounding voice content across formats and languages.

The challenge

A global, non-profit organization with 17 million members needed a way to deliver voice-enabled content across a wide spectrum—magazines, e-books, e-learning modules, and pronunciation guides—while ensuring specialized terms were pronounced correctly in multiple languages.

Traditional text-to-speech (TTS) systems struggle to keep up with both scale and content diversity. New vocabulary, names, and places often lack a unified pronunciation standard, which not only makes the audio sound inaccurate but—especially during translation and multilingual adaptation—can lead to misunderstandings and reduced credibility. Manual audio corrections are slow and inefficient, while SSML lexicons offer only piecemeal fixes. What’s really missing is an intelligent system that can capture pronunciation knowledge, build a centralized “pronunciation database,” and enable large-scale validation and rapid deployment of consistent rules.

This challenge required a solution that could simultaneously respect linguistic precision, handle diverse media types, and operate seamlessly across multiple languages.

Centific’s approach

Centific partnered with the organization to co-develop an AI-infused multimodal localization and TTS solution. The approach combined three key elements:

1. Pronunciation Guide System – A custom platform where the organization can upload terms, input phonemes, preview sounds instantly, and save approved pronunciations for re-use.

2. Human + AI Collaboration – Trained native speakers moderated AI output, while the organization’s own language coaches oversaw approvals, ensuring accuracy and consistency.

3. Broad Language Coverage – The solution supported 154 languages overall, with content localized into 18, including French, Telugu, Urdu, Ukrainian, Russian, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, Tagalog, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swahili. Pronunciation libraries are being extended to cover up to 60 languages.

By combining AI innovation with human expertise, Centific created an integrated pronunciation management system capable of scaling across content types and languages.

Solution in action

The collaboration began with a flagship publication and quickly extended to other formats. E-books and guides were delivered in natural-sounding audio, e-learning modules gained lifelike narration, and specialized pronunciation resources helped ensure accuracy for terminology and key phrases.

This multi-format success proved the flexibility of Centific’s approach and demonstrated that one platform could unify audio delivery across the organization’s entire content ecosystem.

Results

 The partnership delivered measurable gains:

• Voice-enabled magazines, e-books, e-learning, and pronunciation guides delivered in 18 languages with expansion to 60 underway.

• Reduced correction cycles from days to minutes while preserving linguistic fidelity.

• Average pronunciation retrieval time was reduced to seconds, significantly improving search efficiency.

• Term-to-pronunciation accuracy reached 100%, ensuring users consistently access reliable results and strengthening the overall quality of the pronunciation database.

• Customer satisfaction reached 100%, reflecting greater trust and stronger engagement across the organization’s user community.

Pronunciation accuracy was consistent across languages, correction cycles that once took days were shortened to minutes, and content now spans 18 languages with expansion to 60 planned. By providing voice-enabled content, the organization also enhances accessibility for audiences with limited literacy or visual impairments.

Together, these results showed how AI-powered voice solutions can balance scale, speed, and precision—delivering both operational efficiency and broader inclusion.

Lessons learned

Centific’s work underscores that domain-specific AI systems are critical for organizations with specialized vocabularies. Human oversight ensures accuracy where nuance matters most, and streamlined workflows make real-time validation possible.

Ultimately, the lesson is that trust and linguistic fidelity cannot be left to chance—they must be designed into the system from the start.

Broader impact

Beyond this organization, the approach offers a roadmap for education, healthcare, and corporate training—any field where voice content must be both scalable and precise. In healthcare, for instance, text-to-speech systems must handle terms like myasthenia gravis or clopidogrel, where even slight mispronunciations can affect comprehension and trust, especially in patient education or medication instruction materials. E-learning, in particular, can benefit from accurate, multilingual narration that maintains quality while reaching diverse audiences.

This project illustrates how voice AI, when thoughtfully implemented, becomes not just a technology solution but a bridge to deeper engagement across languages and communities.