TURIN, Italy, and STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Loquendo, the global speech technology company, and Artificial Solutions, specialist in optimizing and automating Customer Support through natural language solutions, announce the integration of Loquendo Text to Speech into Artificial Solution's Interactive Web Assistant for IKEA's UK website.

The interactive customer care service on IKEA's website - Ask Anna - is a human-like online assistant that can move, smile, understand and now also speak using Loquendo's truly lifelike Text To Speech, answering customer queries and helping them to find their way around the site.

Employing an Interactive Web Assistant for first line customer support, i.e. for responding to straightforward and repetitive questions, is highly cost efficient. Artificial Solutions' Interactive Web Assistant is particularly effective because it takes visitors straight to the appropriate webpage.

Thanks to Artificial Solution's innovative Interactive Web Assistant, visitors to the IKEA website can type in their questions on any aspect of IKEA product lines and services, and they will receive a prompt reply in an expressive and natural sounding voice. Questions can be phrased in a truly natural way and Anna will understand by identifying the key words, or will ask follow-up questions if more information is required to give a fully comprehensive response. Anna's knowledge base is gradually enhanced by means of dialogue analysis, while responses and URLs can be easily updated.

Artificial Solutions' Interactive Web Assistant can be combined with a human-operator service, transferring calls to an operator if required and thus ensuring that customers always receive a complete and seamless service.

Loquendo Speech Technology provides truly natural and highly expressive synthetic speech, and each voice can be personalised to suit a company's profile. Furthermore, all of Loquendo's 47 voices, in 20 different languages, can correctly pronounce any other language while maintaining their native accent.

Ask Anna with TTS technology is currently only available on the UK site and in English, but expansion is expected to other Ask Annas in many different languages, on the numerous IKEA websites. During 2006 Anna helped over 10,000,000 IKEA customers and is now managing around 40,000 dialogues every day on the various IKEA web sites, generating cost savings of well over 10m euro per year.

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 Artificial Solutions
Artificial Solutions helps larger organisations and companies to drastically reduce their customer service costs while at the same time increasing customer satisfaction. These results are achieved by implementing our Customer Service Optimization, CSO™ concept that enables efficient optimization between the various service channels such as chat, e-mail and telephone as well as optimization between automated, semi-automated and manual service in all these service channels.

The applications used in the CSO™ concept are based on advanced natural language processing and include the Interactive Web Assistant, the Agent Based Chat, the E-mail Processor and the Interactive Phone Assistant. The knowledge used by these applications is managed in the web based knowledge management tool CSO™ Knowledge and the statistics and log files generated from the applications can be viewed and analyzed in the web based tool CSO™ Analysis.

For more information on how Artificial Solutions can help your company to drastically reduce your customer service costs and improve customer satisfaction, please contact us at info@artificial-solutions.com or read more at www.artificial-solutions.com.