Loquendo, the leading innovator in speech technology, is proud to announce Florence, the brand new French voice. She will join Bernard, Juliette and Sophie to give our customers a broad and varied range of French speaking voices.

Loquendo voices benefit from an impressive array of new features, including improved fluency achieved by concatenation smoothing, and heightened naturalness by the insertion of pauses and vocal intonations to better express the meaning of a text.

Florence can also be personalised to suit your company profile. Using any Loquendo voice, it is possible to adjust the pitch, speaking rate, timbre etc, and, by simply saving the settings, you'll have a persona with a character all its own. You can even, for example, create the voice of a child, an elderly person or a cartoon character.

Lexicons can be added (e.g. for reading text message abbreviations), or particular pronunciation styles can be selected (e.g. for reading technical data), so rendering Loquendo TTS adaptable for use in any context.

In addition, Florence benefits from a range of audio controls, such as reverb and stereo, which can be applied to any voice, piece of music or special effect. You can use such features to give the impression, for example, of a small room or a large hall, while voices can be positioned around this space, by the use of stereo, to create a wide depth of field. Music can then be added and, if required, rhythmically synchronized with the reading of the text.

Furthermore, Florence is the latest Loquendo voice to be enriched with 'expressive cues': many commonly used phrases and exclamations can be said in a truly lifelike way giving Loquendo's voices a far wider emotional range.
Florence can also be made to laugh, sigh, hiccup and cry, to name just a few examples, by the insertion of the relevant tag.

Florence will be presented for the very first time at VOCAL EXPO in Paris, France on 20th June 2006, at Concorde Lafayette. We hope to see you there.

To hear Florence for yourself, click here.

To meet the whole Loquendo TTS French-speaking family, click here.

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 VoxNauta Platform are high-quality, high-performance technologies that guarantee systems integrators the best solutions in 18 languages with 42 voices.

Loquendo is the only speech technology vendor that provides a complete product line for servers, desktop, PDAs and embedded, guaranteeing the same wide range 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.

For more information about Loquendo, and to hear demos of all the Loquendo voices, go to www.loquendo.com.