Turin, January 19th, 2005

Loquendo, the global speech technology company, today announced the release of Loquendo ASR 6.5. This new version of the speech recognition software includes important application development enhancements and supports the Dutch language.

The latest release includes two major application development enhancements:
Loquendo ASR supports both literal and ECMA Script syntax for grammar semantic interpretation tags, in accordance with the latest working draft of W3C SISR (Semantic Interpretation for Speech Recognition). ECMA scripting language, a standardized version of JavaScript, is widely used by applications developers. It enables users to script grammars without learning another proprietary language and is extremely powerful, allowing complex processing and data structure definition. Moreover, this standard will allow a better integration with VoiceXML, simplifying semantic results handling.

The second important development in Loquendo ASR 6.5 concerns Distributed Speech Recognition (DSR) according to ETSI ES 202 050 and ES 202 212 specifications: Loquendo ASR is now able to process advanced (noise-robust) front-end signal feature streams for DSR/Aurora systems. This avoids the degradations caused both by the voice encoding process and by the effects of transmission errors. It also considerably improves robustness to background noise. DSR/Aurora front-end is being adopted by the world’s top mobile vendors.

Loquendo ASR is the next-generation speech recognition technology the makes it possible to create automated voice solutions that are accurate, flexible and robust - even in the noisiest of environments. The wide range of Loquendo ASR languages is now also available in Dutch alongside Argentinean, Brazilian, Castilian Spanish, Catalan, Chilean, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Mexican, Portuguese, Swedish, U.K. and U.S. English.

Loquendo - Vocal Technology and Services
With over 30 years of R&D expertise, Loquendo is at the forefront of the global speech technologies market. Its high-quality, high-performance technologies (Loquendo TTS - text to speech, Loquendo ASR - automatic speech recognition, Loquendo Speech Server, Loquendo Speaker Verification) and platforms guarantee systems integrators the best solutions in 16 languages and 36 voices - with more coming soon.

From its headquarters in Turin, Italy, Loquendo deploys technologies that power millions of calls every day in the telecommunications and enterprise markets throughout the world.
For more information, visit www.loquendo.com.