December 12th, 2007

Loquendo, the global speech technology provider, launches two new languages - Galician and Valencian. Carmela is the new female Galician voice, Empar the new female Valencian voice.

The release of these two new languages demonstrates the growing investment Loquendo is making in supporting all the languages in Spain, extending Loquendo's reach and reinforcing the positions of the company and its partners in the rapidly expanding Spanish markets. Loquendo TTS and ASR already support Castilian Spanish and Catalan and now, with four languages and 7 voices, Loquendo is in the strongest position ever to meets its partners' needs in Spain. Loquendo speech technology already leads the market on the Iberian Peninsula as a whole.

This latest addition to the Loquendo family brings the total number of languages to 23 and the total number of voices to 54. Currently available languages include U.S. and U.K. English, American Spanish, Mexican, Chilean and Argentinian Spanish, Castilian, Catalan, Valencian, Galician, Brazilian, Portuguese, Italian, Esperanto, German, French, Dutch, Greek, Mandarin Chinese, Swedish, Turkish, Canadian French and Polish in both male and female voices, with more under development all the time.

Carmela and Empar benefit from an impressive array of features: superior fluency achieved by concatenation smoothing; heightened naturalness by the insertion of pauses and a variety of vocal intonations; enhanced pronunciation accuracy thanks to the Morphological Analyser, which works at word-unit level to resolve pronunciation irregularities and ambiguities.

Along with all Loquendo voices, Valencian and Galician are available for Telephony, Multimedia and Embedded applications: integrators can select the footprint that best suits their needs, knowing they are always guaranteed the same wide range of highly expressive voices in all major languages, and all with the same core engine.

Loquendo is the only speech provider on the market to offer an emotional component: the award-winning and expressive Loquendo TTS, a major advance in speech technology that gives Loquendo's voices truly lifelike expression and a far wider emotional range. Like other Loquendo voices, Empar and Carmela can pronounce many everyday expressions in a lively and expressive way. They can also laugh, sigh, cry, and much more besides. Thanks to a user friendly interface, the prompt designer can select the expression required from an easy to use drop-down list.

Valencian and Galician fully support the X-SAMPA phonetic alphabet, as well as the SAMPA variants from TeleAtlas® and Navteq™, making them ready for use in car navigation systems.

Hear Empar for yourself
Hear Carmela for yourself
Meet the Loquendo TTS family

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 Loquendo VoxNauta are high-quality, high-performance technologies that guarantee systems integrators the best solutions whatever the application.

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

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

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