Bringing real world experience to the development of the Speech Application Language Tags specification for multimodal applications

Turin, Italy - January 31st, 2002 -
Loquendo, a Telecom Italia Lab's global speech technology company (Telecom Italia Group), today announced they have joined the Speech Application Language Tags Forum, to assist in the formulation of the Speech Applications Language Tags specification. Based on deploying Loquendo's HTML VoiceBrowser, which uses speech tags within HTML to voice enable the information, Loquendo is able to bring real world experience to the formation of a practical open standard.

The Speech Application Language Tags specification provides a framework for a new type of user experience - multimodal applications - giving users access to the same information through a variety of devices. For example, one user could be navigating a web application through voice commands and seeing the results visually on a screen, and another could be listening to the same application over the phone with the information being read to them.

"We are pleased to be able to contribute our technical knowledge to the formation of such an important initiative", said Silvano Giorcelli, CEO Loquendo, "Speech Application Language Tags is an important milestone not only for the creation of speech recognition based applications, but for widespread adoption of richer multimodal applications."

Loquendo's voice application platform, VoxNauta, today gives carriers and enterprises the ability to easily voice enable their web based information. Supporting multiple development environments, VoiceXML and HTML speech tags it is one of the most versatile platforms on the market. With Speech Application Language Tags and the use of multimodal applications, companies will now be able to extend the reach of their information to customers and employees anytime, anywhere and through any device.

About Loquendo
Loquendo (www.loquendo.com), a company of Telecom Italia Group, is a global leader in speech platforms and solutions that make information and services accessible through any phone. Born 1/02/2001 in Turin (Italy) where its headquarters are located, Loquendo, using world-class speech recognition, text-to-speech and voice browsing technology based on its unsurpassed experience known around the world, deploys innovative high-quality vocal solutions.

Loquendo develops multilingual-portal, call center, multi-channel platforms, CRM systems, and vocal Internet/Intranet applications. Many enterprises and carriers world-wide have recognized the Loquendo difference.

About the Speech Application Language Tags Forum
The Speech Application Language Tags Forum brings together a diverse group of companies sharing a common interest in developing and promoting speech technologies for multimodal and telephony applications. Founded in 2001 by Cisco, Comverse, Intel, Philips, Microsoft and Speechworks, the Forum seeks to develop a royalty-free standard that augments existing mark-up languages to provide spoken access to many forms of content through a wide variety of devices.

For more information:
Ornella Ambrois
Loquendo SpA