Turin, October 11 2004

Loquendo, the global speech technology company, is pleased to announce that a new European country has been added in its portfolio: Holland! Willem, the new male Dutch voice able of being as natural as never before, is the latest development in Loquendo's multilingual world of lifelike synthetic speech.
Customers now can leverage on a High Quality Dutch Voice that can be used in different applications such as Voice Activated Dialing, Email Reading, Voice Portals, Navigation, Timetable & Traffic Information, Call Center, CRM and Unified Messaging.
This new entry into the family of Loquendo TTS is a new landmark in Loquendo's commitment to providing customers with expanded reach in today's global marketplace for both embedded and network-based applications. Quite soon Willem will be joined by the Loquendo TTS bubbly Dutch female voice.
"Loquendo's mission is to provide end-users with the best voice applications and to continue with investments in the speech technology market," said Rosanna Duce, Sales and Marketing VP of Loquendo. "The release of Loquendo TTS in Dutch is a great news for European businesses that are looking to maximize their existing speech investments and provide callers with a truly experienced technology".
Loquendo is continuously working at giving expressiveness to Loquendo TTS. Loquendo TTS voices provide "expressive cues", such as paralinguistic events (e.g. breath, cough, laugh, etc.) and conventional formulas (e.g. greetings, apologies, etc.) uttered with expressive prosody. Such cues are available to the TTS users to enliven their voice prompts.
To listen to the synthetic voice of Willem and its expressivities, please click here and the following funny story.
In addition, one of the most peculiarity Loquendo TTS capabilities is the Phoneme Mapping, where the phonemes of one language are mapped into another to support the mixed language text. This is the approach where the speaker has to pronounce foreign words included in a text written predominantly in her/his own language: he/she will be inclined to pronounce these words in a manner that may differ - also significantly - from the correct pronunciation. The approximation of this kind of pronunciation is especially due to the speaker choice of maintaining his native-tongue phonological system, but also to co-articulation, economy of effort, and to psychosocial factors.

To listen to how Willem can speak foreign languages, please click self-presentation.

With Loquendo's 35 clear and lifelike text-to-speech voices, developers are facilitate in creating a world of automated speech-enabled services, available 24x7, which are cutting their customers' costs, improving user satisfaction and generating revenue around the world. In addition, Loquendo TTS provides handset suppliers with a high-quality embedded TTS voice to create new consumer applications."
To meet the Loquendo TTS family, please click here.


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.