Turin, May 18th, 2005

Loquendo, the global speech technology company, announces its latest development in high-quality, multilingual synthetic speech. Loquendo TTS is now integrated with the Symbian OS™ Operating System. Loquendo embedded TTS for Symbian OS™ provides totally eyes-free interaction with mobile handsets. Loquendo’s new engine stands out in comparison with other robotic-sounding products on the market and provides a unique set of features, which have never been available on mobile phones before.

These features include the same powerful text analysis capability as the server version, accurate semantic analysis and lexicon file customisation. A specialized SMS pre-processor, which enables all typical texting abbreviations to be read correctly is also included. Loquendo embedded TTS for Symbian OS™ provides full multilingual capability - more than one voice and language can be used concurrently and dynamically switched. The engine also carries out automatic language identification: the text pre-processor automatically identifies multiple languages in a text, and uses the corresponding language and voice accordingly. It also includes mixed language capability - a feature that is unique to Loquendo technology - and enables foreign words to be pronounced correctly, without switching voices.
With Loquendo embedded TTS for Symbian OS™, users also benefit from Loquendo’s emotional synthetic voices - capable of conveying expressive intention, such as greetings and apologies, in a lifelike, expressive manner for an even more natural effect.

Loquendo offers a single set of languages and voices both on the device side and the server side, allowing mobile operators to achieve a unique and consistent branded image, regardless of the architectural solution. Indeed, Loquendo technology enables service providers to guarantee a totally seamless service (same languages, same voices, etc.) even in mixed environments, where some prompts originate from the network and others are generated locally from the handset. This is yet another asset that sets Loquendo apart from the competition.

“We believe that making Loquendo TTS available on Symbian OS™ will have a dramatically positive impact on the market for Symbian OS™ based smartphones. There is a world of opportunity out there for complex, high-quality services requiring the very best technologies," says Paolo Coppo, Director of Business Development at Loquendo. “Loquendo TTS is the best fit for a brand new set of user-friendly services such as voice feed-back for the visually impaired and the elderly, navigation services, SMS and e-mail reading”. The addition of the Symbian OS™ to our portfolio further strengthens Loquendo’s position as a leading player in the high-quality, international speech technologies market.

For more information, contact embedded@loquendo.com

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 36 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.