Turin, September 09th, 2005

Loquendo, the global speech technology company, is leveraging its latest achievements in speech technology and natural language dialogue to power the Municipality of Barcelona's "Large Object Collection" service and the Municipality of Turin's "Cultural Agenda" information service, developed in the context of the EU-funded HOPS IST project. The project's principal objective is that of enabling an intelligent natural language-based Hub for the deployment of advanced semantically enriched, multi-channel, mass-scale Online Public Services.

The first prototypes of these exciting new-generation services were successfully deployed in July 2005 in Castillan Spanish, Catalan, Italian and UK English. Residents of Barcelona (Spain), requiring the local municipal services to collect particularly large and heavy refuse items from their homes, obtain the service by interacting over the phone with the automated call center entirely by voice. Meanwhile, those interested in enjoying the multiple cultural highlights of Turin (Italy), interact with their local automated call centre for all the necessary information for all of the city's cultural events, including concerts and art exhibitions, simply using their voice.
These services will become even more friendly and enjoyable with the introduction of Loquendo's patented Spoken Dialogue System (Loquendo SDS), a natural-language based mixed initiative dialogue technology. The enhanced version of the service will be launched in conjunction with Turin's 2006 Winter Olympics.

The HOPS project services are fully automated and powered by Loquendo's automatic speech recognition and synthetic speech engines Loquendo TTS and Loquendo ASR, integrated within the Loquendo VoxNauta platform.
Loquendo's speech technology portfolio fully supports developers to address the main issues involved in speech services, from simple grammars to complex services featuring mixed initiative dialogue.

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 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.

About HOPS
The HOPS project is a collaborative effort of the Municipality of Barcelona, Spain, the Municipality of Turin, Italy, the London Borough of Camden, United Kingdom. It is supported by the following industrial partners: Loquendo, Italy; SUN Microsystem, Spain; iSOCO, Spain; supported by local integrators as CSI and CSP, Italy; ITDeusto, Spain; Runtime Collective, United Kingdom; and academic partners: TALP Research Center, Spain; University of Torino, Italy; University of Amsterdam, Netherlands.

For more information, visit www.bcn.es/hops/.