December 20th 2004

On December 7th and 8th, in Dortmund (Germany), the kick-off meeting of the European project "Share" has been held.

The "Share" project develops a Push-To-Share advanced mobile service that will provide critical multimodal communication support for emergency teams, such as firefighters, during rescue operations. It will combine advanced, innovative technologies to allow mobile workers to communicate naturally and bi-directionally, and to share structured multimodal information resources, including audio, video, text, graphic and location information. The first release of this project will be tested by the Dortmund firefighters.

The text-to-speech technology for accessing textual information is provided by Loquendo. The Loquendo TTS will be integrated in the Push-to-Share architecture and will be optimized on the application domain. The focused language will be German, for which a special tuning will be performed to obtain perfect pronunciation, e.g. of street names in the car navigation system for firefighters. Prosodic and acoustic processing will also be experimented in order to ensure perfect intelligibility and effectiveness of the synthetic voice in the difficult and noisy conditions prevailing during rescue operations.

Loquendo, the global speech technology company, is one of the main partners of this project, which involves universities and companies of several countries (Germany, France, Italy, Belgium and Greece).

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 16 languages and 35 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.