Loquendo Newsletter April 2008
April 2008

Foreword

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the April issue of the Loquendo Newsletter, keeping our readers informed of all that the company has been up to over the last few months.

This month we feature a number of important releases of Loquendo Products, including two new Brazilian voices (male & female), a new release of Annika, the Swedish female voice, paving the way for the new male Swedish voice coming up in the summer, and the availability of Loquendo TTS for the MacOS X platform. We are also pleased to announce that the Loquendo MRCP Server has been rated Avaya Compliant in its version Loquendo Speech Suite 7.0: it is compatible with Avaya Interactive Response 3.0, Avaya Voice Portal 4.0 and Avaya Communication Manager 4.0, allowing our partners and customers seamless, brand-independent upgrades to new releases and languages, so protecting their investments.

In Partners and Customers, Loquendo’s positioning in the avatar sector goes from strength to strength. In particular, Loquendo’s partnership with H-Care continues to build new success stories, with the release of Chiara, the Human Digital Assistant for the FIAT showroom online - created by H-Care and featuring Loquendo TTS.
We are also pleased to announce that Loquendo technologies are powering icex.es - the website of the Spanish Institute for Foreign Trade - integrated with the Interactive Digital Assistant from Umanify.
The Human Digital Assistant continues to find traction in many diverse markets throughout the world as a user friendly online assistant for customer care, and our Article this month, entitled 'Life Without a Face' by Umberto Basso, CEO of H-Care, features interesting insights on the use of avatars online.

Other key news since last newsletter has been the official notification of the Frost & Sullivan award made to Loquendo: ‘The 2008 European Emerging Company of the Year in the Telematics and Infotainment Market’. The prize is presented each year to the company that “has the exceptional know-how to take advantage of market changes through the execution of innovative strategies within the existing competitive landscape.”

In Standards Corner we hear all the latest on the work of the principal bodies for the development of standards, including the release of new working drafts. Loquendo recently presented implementation results for the PLS 1.0 and EMMA 1.0 specifications. PLS 1.0 is the Pronunciation Lexicon Specification standard, whose development was led by Paolo Baggia of Loquendo. This work will help these specifications to become W3C standards as soon as possible.

Loquendo continues its close involvement in various R&D Activities, including the successful completion of the first year of the FP6-IST COMPANIONS project, whose goal is to develop “personalised conversational interfaces, by means of agents that interact with the user on a long term basis”. The project will seek to develop speech technologies capable of identifying the emotional state of the user, and of mirroring this in expressive text to speech. The first year’s results are outlined in the COMPANIONS Report.

Events in store for 2008 include: G-Force 2008 USA in San Antonio, Texas - April 28-30; G-Force 2008 EMEA in Berlin - May 19-21; ISS WORLD ASIA PACIFIC in Singapore - June 9-11; Vocal Expo 2008 in Paris - June 17; The Canalys Navigation Forum 2008 in Budapest - September 8-10.

We look forward to seeing you there!
Contents
> In-Depth
> Loquendo News
> Loquendo Products
> Partners & Customers
> R&D Activities
> Standards Corner
> Events

Loquendo Awarded "Market Leader - Best Speech Engine" at SpeechTEK 2007

Loquendo Awarded "Best Practices Award 2008"

G-Force 2008

VoiceXML Forum Sponsor

From Speech
Technology Magazine, April 2008
> "NLP on Fertile Ground" By Leonard Klie
 > "The Expanding Speech Tech Universe " By James A. Larson
 > "Getting the Devil out of the Details" By Ryan Joe

Loquendo TTS Awarded "Best Innovation in Text To Speech" at SpeechTEK WEST 2007

VoiceXML Forum Sponsor

ISS WORLD ASIA PACIFIC 2008

Loquendo′s
White Papers
> Towards IMS: The Potential of VoiceXML for Multimedia Applications
 > Speech Technologies And Multimodality: The Solution For New Advanced Services
 > SSML 1.0: an XML-based language to improve TTS rendering

Vocal Expo 2008

SpeechTEK 2008

From VoiceXML Review, Apr/May 2007
> "Standards for Multimodal Applications: Recent Activities in the W3C Multimodal Interaction Working Group" by Deborah Dahl
 > "The 2006 VoiceXML Forum Survey" by Mark Eichten and Jim Ferrans

The Canalys Navigation Forum 2008



 

 

 

IN-DEPTH

The Article this issue features some thoughts by Umberto Basso, CEO and founder of H-Care, on the central role human-like virtual assistants are now playing in customer relationship management.

>> Go to the article "Life Without A Face".

We also include a link to one of GOOGLE’S TECH TALKS, in which Paolo Baggia, Loquendo’s Director of Standards, discusses “Speech Technologies and Platforms - Present and Future Evolutions.”

>> Watch the Video.
>> See Paolo's bio.

LOQUENDO NEWS

  • Loquendo Awarded ‘2008 Frost & Sullivan European Telematics and Infotainment Emerging Company of the Year’
    February 28th 2008
    The Frost & Sullivan Award was conferred to Loquendo for its excellence in "new market penetration, strategy innovation, technological innovation and leadership, revenue and market share growth".
    "Loquendo has managed to introduce many innovative ASR and TTS solutions, which have enabled the company to gain a market leading position amongst ASR and TTS suppliers in the PND market," explains Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst N. Praveen Chandrasekar.
    >> More

LOQUENDO PRODUCTS

  • Loquendo TTS Now Available For Mac OS X Application Developers in 23 Languages
    April 28th, 2008
    Loquendo announces that Loquendo TTS is now available for developers of multimedia applications on Apple Inc's Mac OS X operating system (versions 10.4 and later).
    Loquendo TTS uses high performing algorithms which guarantee an extremely rapid response, allowing the synthesis of different languages and voices simultaneously, switching between them at any time and on any channel, making Loquendo TTS suitable for use in telephony, multimedia or embedded devices.
    >> More

  • Loquendo Releases Two New Brazilian Voices
    April 14th, 2008
    Loquendo presents Felipe and Fernanda - the new Brazilian voices - who join Gabriela, Loquendo's existing Brazilian voice, in giving Loquendo's clients extended reach in the Brazilian markets and in reinforcing the company’s leading position in Latin America with a wide choice of highest quality voices: Brazilian, Argentinian, Chilean, Mexican and American Spanish. This brings the total number of Loquendo voices to 56, with the total number of languages at 23.
    >> More

    Hear Fernanda for yourself.
    Hear Felipe for yourself.
    Meet the Loquendo TTS family.

  • Loquendo Solution Now Rated "Avaya Compliant"
    April 2nd, 2008
    Loquendo announced that its Loquendo MRCP Server, in its version Loquendo Speech Suite 7.0, is compliant with Web self-service and IP telephony solutions from Avaya - a leading global provider of business communications applications, systems and services.
    The Loquendo MRCP Server offers an optimized server-based solution for large-scale telephony deployments of speech technologies, such as contact centers and self-service applications.
    >> More

  • New Release of Annika – the Swedish Voice from Loquendo
    March 27th, 2008
    Loquendo released an upgraded version of Annika, Loquendo’s female Swedish voice. She now benefits from improved pronunciation accuracy and ‘Expressive Cues’ for an increased emotional range.
    Annika will be joined by a male Swedish voice in the summer, followed by the release of the Finnish and Danish languages towards the end of 2008.
    >> More

    Hear Annika for yourself.
    Meet the Loquendo TTS family.

PARTNERS & CUSTOMERS

  • The Spanish Institute for Foreign Trade uses Loquendo Speech Technologies for its Web-based Services
    April 29th, 2008
    ICEX – the Spanish Institute for Foreign Trade has selected Loquendo as their speech technologies provider. The ICEX web portal now features Loquendo speech technologies, bringing a new burst of added value to its visitors.
    >> More

  • AvMap Integrates Loquendo Embedded TTS into the Geosat6
    April 17th, 2008
    Loquendo and AvMap, world leader in satellite navigation solutions and fleet tracking systems, announced that AvMap has chosen Loquendo Embedded TTS to power its innovative GPS navigator - the Geosat 6. The integration of Loquendo’s highly expressive TTS allows drivers to devote full attention to the road without having to look at the screen or touch the controls.
    >> More

  • Chiara, FIAT Auto's Virtual Assistant: Another Successful Partnership between H-Care and Loquendo
    April 15th, 2008
    Loquendo and H-care - leader in developing multi-channel platforms for self-service and customer care - present Chiara, the new and revolutionary Human Digital Assistant (HDA).
    Chiara is H-Care's virtual assistant and voice guide for FIAT's online showroom.
    "Build your own FIAT!" with Chiara - who guides you through the huge range of options available for each FIAT model.
    H-Care's HDAs are human-like avatars with lifelike facial expressions synchronised perfectly with Loquendo's high quality, award-winning text to speech.
    H-care has won the prestigious award ‘Red Herring 100 Europe’, given every year to the best private businesses in the technology sector.
    >> More

INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH ACTIVITIES

  • R&D PROJECTS

    COMPANIONS     is a three year project involving businesses and institutions from many countries for the development of Embodied Conversational Agents. The results of the first year of this project can be read in the COMPANIONS Report.
    >> More

  • CONFERENCES

    Bellagio 2008
    Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio, Italy, October 6-7, 2008
    The Fourth International Workshop on Human-Computer Conversation brings together academic researchers and industrialists concerned with all aspects of human-computer conversation and the associated research issues of emotion, relationships, companionship, embodiment, ECAs, memory, evaluation etc.
    >> Other Relevant Events

    ICASSP-2008 – IEEE 2008 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing
    Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S.A., March 30 – April 4, 2008
    On Friday, April 4, 2008, Loquendo presented "Stream-based Speaker Segmentation using Speaker Factors and Eigenvoices"
    Speech Processing - SPE-L9: Speaker Recognition I
    (Daniele Colibro, Loquendo)
    >> More

STANDARDS CORNER

  • Loquendo Implemented both PLS 1.0 and EMMA 1.0 Specifications
    April 2008
    To become W3C Recommendation a specification must pass the Candidate Recommendation stage which includes the demonstration of the implementability of the specification by the general public.

    Loquendo recently presented public results for two specifications: April 4 for Pronunciation Lexicon Specification (PLS) Version 1.0 and April 9 for Extensible MultiModal Annotation (EMMA) Version 1.0 specification. If the results shown for PLS 1.0 were complete, click here, the results for EMMA 1.0 were focused on the production of EMMA results from a recognition engine for speech and DTMF input, click here.

    Loquendo sees great value in the adoption of the EMMA standard for MRCP version 2 speech servers, such as Loquendo MRCP Server which already supports EMMA results.

  • New Working Draft of Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces
    April 14, 2008
    The fourth Working Draft of "Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces" (MMI Architecture) has been published by Multimodal Interaction (MMIWG) working group.

    The main features from the previous draft include a more extensive definition of the events sent between the Runtime Framework and the Modality Components, including schemas for the individual messages, and the ladder diagrams showing message sequences.

    Comments are welcome and should be sent to the public archive
    www-multimodal@w3.org     with a subject starting with the prefix "[arch]".

  • Fifth Working Draft of SSML 1.1 Published
    March 17, 2008
    In March, the Voice Browser (VBWG) working group published a new working draft of Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) 1.1 specification. This is the fifth working draft and the expectations are that the next one will be the Last Call Working Draft.

    The major changes included in this new draft are the introduction of Section 2.2.5 about profiles (core and extended) and the definition of volume attribute better aligns with the definition of soundlevel attribute in the audio element.

  • Summaries of W3C MMI and VB Meetings in Orlando
    March 2-7, 2008
    At the beginning of March, the Voice Browser (VBWG) and Multimodal Interaction (MMIWG) working groups met in Orlando hosted by the Voxeo company for a whole week of discussions about the specifications under development.

    The major topics under discussion were: review of progress towards a preliminary draft of VoiceXML 3.0 specification and the decision of errata for VoiceXML 2.0/2.1 specifications (for VBWG part); finalisation of the next working draft of MMI architecture specification (for MMIWG part).

    Public reports are now available for the MMIWG meeting, click here, and for VBWG meeting, click here.

EVENTS

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