Obi 5.1 , released on May 17, 2025
Obi 5.1 uses artificial intelligence(AI) for enhancing functionalities, comes with incremental features and provides bug fixes. The synthetic speech generation has been enhanced by introduction of high-quality Azure AI voices from Microsoft, noise reduction has been enhanced by using AI models, performance is improved for phrase navigation along with other improvements.
The enhancements of Obi 5.1 release are briefed below. For feedback, comments and bug reports please contact us via email: obi.feedback@gmail.com.
Version 5.1 will work on Windows 7, 8, 10 and 11. Please use version 4.8 for Windows Vista and version 3.9 for Windows XP, available on the download page.
Highlights of Obi 5.1 release
Introduced high quality Microsoft Azure AI voices for synthetic speech generation
The new Obi enhances the generate speech functionality. It gives user to choose from system installed voices and Azure AI voices. Using this feature now high-quality speech can be generated from text, which is comparable with human narration. You can use this feature through Generate Audio dialog which can be opened from Transport -> Generate speech -> Text To Audio.
Noise reduction improved by using AI models
Noise Reduction can now also be done using artificial intelligence models. This will improve quality of noise reduction . There are three types of noise reduction models to choose from namely Voice, Speech and General. To quickly start using these models open Noise Reduction(AI) dialog from Tools -> Audio Processing -> Noise Reduction(AI).
You can find help on the functionality of these features in the “What’s New?” page of Obi Help, which can be viewed by clicking on the Help contents menu item under Help menu of Obi.
List of some major bugs fixed & behaviour changes made in this release:
- The selected phrase lost the selection after speech is generated for it.
- Crashes are further reduced while working on a very large project.
List of some major bugs fixed & behaviour changes made in Obi 5.1 beta release:
- When setting for “Import old NCC file using Windows 1252 encoding” was checked, some NCC files threw an exception.
- Sometimes the Special Phrase List dialog played the phrase which is not selected instead of playing the selected phrase.
- In the Special Phrase List dialog, when Play command was given on empty phrase list , an exception was thrown.
- The performance of phrase navigation is improved inside a section.
- Crashes are reduced, especially in higher resolution screens.
For complete list of fixed bugs please visit fixed issues page
Download
To download Obi 5.1 please visit download page.
Known limitation
There are some limitations in this release. The team is working consciously towards resolving them. Please visit the known limitations page to know more about them.
Support
If you would like to discuss some Obi feature or report a bug, you can send an email to obi.feedback@gmail.com or file issue on Obi issue tracker. To verify if the bug has already been submitted, please see the list of reported bugs.