April 29th, 2008

Turin, Italy and Madrid, Spain – ICEX – the Spanish Institute for Foreign Trade has selected Loquendo as their speech technologies provider. The ICEX web portal now features Loquendo speech technologies, bringing a new burst of added value to its visitors.

Loquendo adds the online speech capacity to the ICEX websites, enabling visitors to access news, and a variety of services available through the web portal. With the current total of 23 languages and 56 voices offered by Loquendo TTS, ICEX is in a position to cater for all the international markets and countries where Spanish trade programs and policy are active today.

The deployment is taking place in two stages: in the initial phase, Loquendo TTS is powering ICEX's principal web portal www.icex.es, integrated with Umanify's Interactive Digital Assistant. Umanify, one of Loquendo's Spanish partners, specializes in Interactive Digital Assistants for websites, mobile devices and call centers.

With the new user interface, ICEX not only gains a new "web voice", but also enables web access to content in an innovative "computer-human" interaction mode. This type of access is characterized by a high level of usability: the technology adapts to the individual user, according to his or her preferences and not vice versa.

The second phase of this project will incorporate a number of exciting new functionalities, such as new languages, speech web navigation using Loquendo ASR speech recognition, help and FAQ's through Digital Assistants, a new mobile interface access for ICEX content, to name but a few.

Furthermore, using "speech web content" ICEX will be able to deliver even higher content accessibility to differently able groups such as visually impaired users.

"ICEX has chosen Loquendo as its technological partner for this project because we share a common business ethic: we don’t just work with the largest technology companies, we work with the best technology. No surprises then that market analysts such as Gartner identify Loquendo as one of the leading software providers in the Spanish Speech Market" says Carlos Gonzalez, Chief Technology Officer at ICEX.

Rosanna Duce, Loquendo's VP International Sales, states: "We are extremely proud of working with ICEX, because it is one of the most important Spanish organizations and a leader in innovation. This is an exciting project to be involved in as it will set a new trend in the field of international trade".

About ICEX
ICEX (the Spanish Institute for Foreign Trade) is the Spanish public organization in charge of the promotion of Spanish companies internationally in cooperation with Spain's commercial offices abroad.
Its main function is to offer services to Spanish companies to facilitate and enhance their international outlook. ICEX executes its overseas activities through the Spanish Embassy's Trade and Worldwide Economics Offices Network. In Spain, activities are managed through the Regional Trade Offices.
For more information, visit www.icex.es.

About Umanify
Umanify is a start-up company, created in 2002, specializing in interactive digital assistants.
The company develops assistive solutions that combine photorealistic and dynamic characters that speak more than 20 languages and interact directly with the users in real time and in a natural language, eliminating the barriers to information access. We have created a new user experience, much richer on natural interactivity: the IDA, or Interactive Digital Assistant.
For Mobile phones or web applications and in sectors like customer service (auto service, contact center, helpdesk, etc.), citizen help, e-commerce, e-learning, e-banking, home automation, etc, an IDA assists in an effective and continuous way to your customers, cutting down on costs since the first day, increasing customers loyalty, increasing their satisfaction and improving your business image.
For more information about Umanify, please visit www.umanify.com.

About Loquendo - Vocal Technology and Services
With over 30 years experience in speech technology, Loquendo is at the forefront of the global speech market. Loquendo TTS, Loquendo ASR, Loquendo Embedded Technologies, and Loquendo Speaker Identification and Verification are high-quality, high-performance technologies in 23 languages with 56 voices, that guarantee systems integrators the best solutions whatever the application.

Loquendo is the only speech technology vendor that provides a complete product line from desktop PCs and telephony servers to navigation and handheld devices, guaranteeing the same portfolio of languages and the same core engine in these environments.

Many enterprises and carriers worldwide have recognized the Loquendo difference and our advanced technologies power millions of calls every day in the telecommunications and enterprise markets across the globe.

Loquendo is a Telecom Italia company headquartered in Turin, Italy, with offices in the U.S., Spain, Germany and France, and a worldwide network of partners.

For more information about Loquendo, and to hear demonstrations of all Loquendo voices, visit www.loquendo.com.