December 16th, 2004

Loquendo, the global speech technology company, has released Loquendo TTS 6.4 - its latest software technology - which includes an important step forward in application development enhancement: Loquendo TTS Director.

Loquendo TTS Director is a multi-platform Java development tool, which supports users in designing effective prompts for their applications. Text is written and interactively refined through a "listen & edit" procedure, which allows fine-tuning for even better TTS performance.
Prompt designers can effortlessly select the TTS voice, which may be changed through control tags in the text itself; they can choose among Multi-line, Paragraph, or SSML Modes; they can set acoustic and prosodic parameters - i.e. sampling frequency and coding, pitch, speaking rate and volume -, and save their edited prompts both in text and audio formats. An easy-to-use, detailed menu helps them choose all the right TTS features.

The Control Tags menu provides access to Loquendo's TTS Control Tags, which are grouped according to a set of categories - i.e. voice, language, prosody, pronunciation, spelling and pausing, audio mixer, enabling the right choice to be made easily.
The Effects menu smoothly guides users through the software's advanced features, which include "expressive cues" and "plug-in lexicons" to obtain the effect required. They are grouped according to intuitive linguistic categories. The repertoire of Expressive Cues consists of a set of pre-recorded formulas, which include conventional figures of speech, like greetings and exclamations (e.g. "hello!", "oh no!", 'I'm sorry!"), interjections (e.g. "Oh!", "Well!", "Hum"..) and paralinguistic events (e.g. breath, cough, laughter, etc.), which suggest expressive intention (to confirm, doubt, exclaim, thank, etc.). This feature makes vocal messages sound even more lifelike and expressive.
Loquendo technology can be further enhanced using the Plug-in lexicons, which are available to give the engine extra capability for reading specific types of text - e.g. SMS, e-mail - that may contain idiosyncratic spelling of words, abbreviations, symbols, and so on.

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.