Loquendo TTS Director is a multi-platform Java development tool, which helps users to write effective vocal messages for their applications. Text is inserted into the editing box, and may then be honed and fine-tuned by means of a 'listen & edit' procedure to achieve the best possible TTS performance.

Thanks to TTS Director's user-friendly design, commands can be easily selected from a detailed yet intuitive drop-down menu: here the user may change the voice and adjust the reading mode, as well as modify various acoustic and prosodic parameters such as sampling frequency and coding, pitch, speaking rate and volume. The edited message may then be saved in text and/or audio formats.

Two drop-down menus appear above the editing box: one allows the selection of the TTS voice, which may be changed at any time by means of a control tag inserted into the text itself; the other allows selection of the reading mode, by which users may choose from Multi-line, Paragraph, or SSML reading modes. The Play and Stop buttons control the reading of the edited text.

Edited texts may be saved/accessed via the File menu (fig. 1). The Edit allows for cutting and pasting in the editing window (also available by clicking the right mouse button). In the Configuration menu, the various acoustic and prosodic parameters mentioned above may be accessed (sampling frequency and coding, pitch, speaking rate and volume).

The Control Tags menu (fig. 2) provides access to Loquendo's TTS Control Tags, which are grouped into the following user-friendly categories: voice, language, prosody, pronunciation, audio mixer, and spelling and pausing. When a control tag is selected, it is automatically inserted into the editing box at the caret position. In some cases a control tag requires further specification, in which case a yellow text will appear in the editing box asking for the details required: e.g. \voice=<insert a valid voice name>

The Effects menu (fig. 3) guides users through the software's advanced features as available for the active voice, including "expressive cues" and "plug-in lexicons".

The repertoire of Expressive Cues consists of a set of pre-recorded exclamations: these include conventional figures of speech such as greetings and apologies (e.g. "hello!", "I'm sorry!"), interjections (e.g. "You're joking!", "That's amazing!") and also paralinguistic events (e.g. breathing, coughing, laughter etc.). This feature adds a whole new level of expressiveness to the vocal synthesis, making vocal messages even more lifelike.

The SpeechActs submenu displays these Expressive Cues in a series of drop-down menus, grouped together according to intuitive linguistic categories. The paralinguistic events are accessible via the Extras submenu. Once selected, the expression is inserted directly into the editing box.

Loquendo's expressive speech technology can be further enriched using Plug-in lexicons, which are available to boost the speech engine's capacity to read specific types of text, e.g. SMS or e-mail, which may contain abbreviations, symbols, idiosyncratic pronunciation and so on.
The plug-in submenu allows the activation/deactivation of plug-in lexicons for the selected voice. The plug-in lexicon will be activated in the edited text from the caret position onward, until deactivated by the user.