Turin, February 1st, 2005

Loquendo, the global speech technology company and Telefónica Soluciones, the integration and consulting division of Grupo Telefónica, have signed a partner agreement whereby the Loquendo TTS synthetic speech engine and Loquendo ASR automatic voice recognition technology will be integrated within Telefónica Soluciones' ManagerVox® voice applications creation and deployment platform.

The agreement was strongly motivated by the high level of insistence with which Telefónica Soluciones customers requested Loquendo technology, which features a range of characteristics that set it apart from other speech products on the market.

As of today, Telefónica Soluciones customers will enjoy the multiple benefits of Loquendo's high-quality Loquendo TTS synthetic speech engine, which is almost undistinguishable from human speech. In addition, they will benefit from Loquendo's highly accurate and robust speech recognition engine, Loquendo ASR.

Moreover, this standard will allow a better integration with VoiceXML, simplifying semantic results handling.

With Loquendo technology, generating and editing speech content in voice applications is both quicker and cheaper. Customers can mix speech content with background music and within a Castilian text for instance, Loquendo TTS pronounces words in other languages correctly, without the need to switch languages.

In order to deliver competitive products for the voice portal market, Telefónica Soluciones has incorporated the industry's leading technology into its ManagerVox platform. This makes it possible to meet the individual needs of each customer and once again reaffirms the company's commitment to technological innovation.
Integrating Loquendo TTS and Loquendo ASR further enriches Telefónica Soluciones' offering in the voice applications field.

Loquendo offers a full range of technological components to rapidly and easily create best-of-breed solutions in 16 languages. Currently available languages include U.S. and U.K. English, Castilian, Catalan, Mexican, Chilean and Argentinean Spanish, Italian, German, French, Dutch, Greek, Mandarin Chinese, Brazilian, Portuguese and Swedish in both male and female voices.

About Telefonica
Telefónica Soluciones is part of Telefónica Group, one of the world leaders in the telecommunications sector. It is the reference operator for the Spanish and Portuguese speaking markets and the sixth stock market leading operator worldwide. Its activities mainly revolve around the wireline and wireless telephony markets, and broadband is the key tool for developing both markets.

Telefónica Soluciones is the Business Unit of Telefónica Empresas de España that provides complete and integrated solutions to big enterprise clients of the Telefónica Group, on the basis of advanced and innovative information and communications technologies.
For more information, visit www.telefonica.es/empresas.

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.