Loquendo, the world's leading innovator in speech technology, today announced that the Loquendo TTS text to speech engine has been awarded the "Best Innovation in Speech Synthesis" prize at AVIOS-SpeechTEK West 2006, in San Francisco. The prize was awarded for Loquendo's 'Expressive Cues' software, the first of its kind, which offers customers a comprehensive range of highly expressive phrases/exclamations for inserting into a text to render Loquendo's voices ever more emotive and lifelike.

The AVIOS-SpeechTEK Awards are presented to companies for their innovations in technology, and are chosen by a committee appointed by board members of the American Voice Input/Output Society (AVIOS).

At SpeechTEK West 2006, Loquendo was given the opportunity to demonstrate Expressive Cues, the feature that makes the new emotional version of the Loquendo TTS engine quite unique. Loquendo is the first speech market player to offer its customers the real possibility of making their vocal messages as expressive as human interaction. But that's not all: besides conveying Emotional Expression, the new version of Loquendo TTS 7.0 provides a range of advanced features, including control of speaking rate and pitch, various reading modes to handle complex terminology/data, the synchronisation of music with the reading of a text, to name just a few.

The Avios-SpeechTEK 2006 award places Loquendo firmly at the forefront of speech-synthesis technology.

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 17 languages and 39 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.