Turin, Italy and Mexico City, Mexico - Loquendo, the global speech technology company, and Auronix, a leading provider of computer telephony applications, today announced an innovative telephony application developed by Auronix in Mexico. The solution, which incorporates the Loquendo TTS speech engine, is successfully used by Credito Real throughout Mexico.

With hundreds of thousands of customers, Credito Real is the premier provider of customer finance for Mexico's major furniture stores, and has been using Auronix technology for more than 8 years. Credito Real recently upgraded their Aurodialer call-collection system to include Loquendo's American Spanish TTS voice, the expressive and natural-sounding Carlos. This upgrade yielded such a significant increase in collection rates for Credito Real, that a second system was immediately deployed.

In fact, Credito Real have received such a positive customer response that they are planning to introduce Loquendo ASR automatic speech recognition technology alongside Loquendo TTS in their Interactive Voice Response systems: Carlos will greet customers by name, listen and respond to their queries, read out store addresses, give out directions, etc. The service is made possible by Ivervox, the state of the art IVR designed by Auronix. Furthermore, Loquendo speech technology will, in the near future, be used to carry out customer satisfaction surveys for Credito Real.

"We tested several leading technologies on the market," said Maru Ochoa, Auronix Sales Manager for South America. "We chose Loquendo's Carlos because it's the most expressive and high-quality voice available for the Latin-American Spanish sector."

"Loquendo is delighted to be collaborating with Auronix," said Piergiorgio Vittori, Loquendo Area Manager for the Americas. "Their advanced telephony solutions, including IVRs with skill routing and call blending, are enabling call centres to respond ever more efficiently to customers' needs, while Loquendo TTS and Loquendo ASR provide callers with a pleasant and far more natural experience."

Loquendo TTS is the only speech product on the market with an emotional component, known as Gilded TTS, delivering truly lifelike synthetic speech to make any speech application natural-sounding, expressive and easy to use. Loquendo TTS is available in many languages, currently including: U.S. and U.K. English, Castilian Spanish and Catalan, Mexican, Brazilian, Argentinian, Chilean, Portuguese, Italian, German, French, Canadian French, Dutch, Greek, Swedish, Mandarin Chinese and Polish - in both male and female voices - and the language portfolio is continually expanding.

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 Speaker Verification and the Loquendo VoiceXML and CCXML Platform are high-quality, high-performance technologies that guarantee systems integrators the best solutions in 20 languages with 47 voices.

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

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

Loquendo is a Telecom Italia company headquartered in Turin, Italy, with offices in the US, Spain, Germany and France, and a worldwide network of partners. For more information about Loquendo, and to hear demos of all the Loquendo voices, go to www.loquendo.com.

About Auronix
Founded in 1994, Auronix is a leading developer and provider of call center solutions for the Latin American market, with coverage mainly in Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile and the United States.

Auronix implements state-of-the-art solutions for their more than 2500 clients. Their portfolio includes voice recognition and speech synthesis interactive voice response systems (IVRs - Ivervox), automated and predictive dialers for call-collection and customer satisfaction survey (Aurodialer), voice and screen recording (Aurolog), automatic call distribution using skill routing (Calixta ACD), and the unified messaging solution Aurovox-CT.

For further information, please visit www.auronix.com.

About Credito Real
Credito Real is a financial institution providing credit and payment collection, for more than 398 partners with more than 1100 stores throughout Mexico. Their services include: credit programs with fixed payments, fast credit resolution, no upfront payments, no interest credits, interest below credit cards and many more. Credito Real was founded in 1993, with Futu-Iem and GE Capital as their funding partners.