TURIN, Italy and DELFT, The Netherlands - Loquendo, the global speech technology company and Dutchear, the Dutch speech applications experts, today announced that they are joining forces to implement speech driven telephony applications. Through this agreement, Dutchear will integrate Loquendo’s multilingual Synthetic Speech, Automatic Speech Recognition and Speaker Verification technologies in a wide range of speech technology applications for call routing, corporate and personal directory assistance and telephony self-service aimed at the Dutch speech market.

Dutchear has extensive experience with developing and implementing speech driven applications for multi-nationals, mid market and small sized companies. The Dutchear solutions are aimed at short time-to-market and high ROI.

Loquendo offers a high quality, multi-lingual portfolio of speech technologies, including Loquendo TTS and Loquendo ASR which enable systems integrators to provide simple, intuitive voice interaction with information. Loquendo currently supports 16 languages from around the world with additional language technologies under development.

"This partnership is a perfect fit for Dutchear's strategy. We offer our customers the highest quality solutions and Loquendo provides best-of-breed multilingual technology" says Victor Huisman, Managing Director of Dutchear. "Besides providing high-quality multilingual technology, Loquendo also has vast experience in the speech applications field and shares our ambitions".
"Dutchear is already one of the leading speech application developers in The Netherlands and is currently increasing its market growth" said Marco Romagnoli, CEO, Loquendo. "Combining forces will fulfil our joint ambitions and will strengthen Loquendo's positioning in the Dutch market".

About Dutchear
Dutchear develops speech technology applications for call routing, call logging, corporate and personal directory assistance and telephony self-service. Dutchear offers tailor made solutions as well as pay-per-call services. In order to design and implement speech driven applications quickly and with high quality, Dutchear incorporates ready-to-use ASR/Synthesis modules (e.g.: Dutch addresses, Dutch first and last names) and ready-to-use Speaker Verification modules in her solutions.

Dutchear is a spin-off of TNO, the largest R&D organisation in The Netherlands. Since 2005 Dutchear exists as a separate company, in which TNO has a 100% equity stake.

About 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 38 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.