Loquendo News

• Loquendo Headquarters Transferred to Larger Premises
  December 6, 2007
  Loquendo, the global speech technology provider, is pleased to announce the transferral of its headquarters to the new premises located in Via Arrigo Olivetti 6, Turin, Italy, effective from December 3rd.
  The move was approved by the board of directors to meet the needs generated by the company's continuing growth, and anticipates the expansion of the company's personnel in the new year.
  The new, spacious offices are located on the 3rd floor in the same building as TILAB - the research arm of Telecom Italia - and have excellent access to Turin and Milan airports, to the motorway connections for Milan, Lyon and Geneva and to the Turin ring road.
  All of Loquendo's approximately 100 personnel have moved to the new building, although all email addresses and telephone/fax numbers remain unchanged.
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LOQUENDO Products

• Loquendo Launches Two New Languages - Valencian and Galician
  December 12, 2007
  Loquendo launched two new languages - Galician and Valencian. Carmela is the new female Galician voice, Empar the new female Valencian voice.
  The release of these two new languages demonstrates the growing investment Loquendo is making in supporting all the languages in Spain, extending Loquendo's reach and reinforcing the positions of the company and its partners in the rapidly expanding Spanish markets, where Loquendo now supports four languages and seven voices. Loquendo speech technology already leads the market on the Iberian Peninsula as a whole.
  To hear Empar for yourself, click here.
  To hear Carmela for yourself, click here.
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• Loquendo TTS 7 Now Available on Loquendo VoxNauta™ platform
  December 5, 2007
  Loquendo announced that the latest release of Loquendo TTS (version 7) is now available with the latest release of Loquendo VoxNauta™ platform (version 7.0). It already supports Loquendo ASR 7: integrators, therefore, can now upgrade their platforms with all the latest Loquendo technologies - Loquendo TTS, Loquendo ASR and Loquendo Speaker Verification.
  Loquendo VoxNauta™ 7.0 platform, already certified by the VoiceXML Forum as VoiceXML 2.0 compliant, fully supports all relevant W3C standards for voice applications, such as: CCXML 1.0 for call control, VoiceXML 2.0/2.1 for voice applications, SRGS 1.0 and SISR 1.0 for ASR grammars and SSML 1.0 for TTS prompts.
  Loquendo VoxNauta™ 7.0 also includes the following advanced features: conference call management, speaker verification functionalities, higher density for IVR solutions, and a new Service Logs Analyzer tool, which complements the graphical Management Console.
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• Loquendo TTS 7 Now Available on Loquendo MRCP Server
  November 19, 2007
  Loquendo is proud to announce that Loquendo TTS version 7 is also available with the latest release of Loquendo MRCP Server 7 (previously known as Loquendo Speech Suite).
  Loquendo MRCP Server is the solution for fixed, mobile and VoIP telephony and already supports Loquendo ASR 7 for the benefit of the integrators, as well as many other features, including DTMF handling, recording capabilities, barge-in control, etc.
  Loquendo MRCP Server supports both versions of the Media Resource Control Protocol (MRCP) developed by the IETF Speech Services Control working group.
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Clients & Partners

• Computer Instruments Chooses Loquendo Speech Technologies
  December 10, 2007
  Computer Instruments, a seasoned innovator in the development of self-service IVR, CTI, Messaging, and Vertical Applications, and Loquendo announced that Computer Instruments has chosen Loquendo TTS and Loquendo ASR to power its innovative e-IVR solutions product line.
  Computer Instruments e-IVR applications, including the core IVR engines, are speech enabled and, as self-service solutions, are heavily dependent on the performance of high quality ASR and text-to-speech. These applications range from traditional IVR offerings including Data Locators, Form Fillers, and Auto Dialers, etc. to industry specific applications for Health Care, Education, Call Centers and a host of other verticals.
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• Umanify Choose Loquendo Speech Technologies for Their Interactive Digital Assistants
  November 8, 2007
  Umanify, a start-up company developing innovative interactive digital assistants, and Loquendo announced that Loquendo's TTS and ASR engines have been chosen to power Umanify's umanServer Enterprise 2.6 conversational agents platform.
  Umanify enables the creation and development of Interactive Digital Assistants (IDA) capable of assisting customers in a natural and direct way, using lifelike speech and facial expressions. Users can interact with the device as they would with a human agent and not a single button, mouse or screen needs to be touched in order to get the information they require or to get a number of tasks done.
  These assistants have a physically realistic human appearance with emotional expressions and facial gestures based on human anatomic models. The IDA's physical aspect and user interface look&feel are completely customizable and adjustable to any aesthetic. They understand and now also listen and speak thanks to Loquendo's award winning automatic speech recognition and speech synthesis technologies, Loquendo TTS and Loquendo ASR.
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R&D COLLABORATIONS

• The LUNA project: Results from the first year
  Loquendo is proud to announce that the FP6-IST LUNA project, coordinated by Loquendo, has successfully completed its first year. The first review of the project was carried out by two scientific experts nominated by the European Commission, and their conclusions were extremely positive thanks to the many promising results achieved so far.
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STANDARDS CORNER

• Welcome to Pronunciation Lexicon Specification (PLS 1.0) - which has achieved Candidate Recommendation
  December 12, 2007
  PLS 1.0 is a new W3C specification to allow the customization of pronunciations for both ASR and TTS to be used in Voice Browser applications. This is another important element to allow the creation of standard speech applications.
  This specification is now complete and mature and all the comments publicly received have been addressed in the Disposition of Comments document. Companies are now called to make implementations so that PLS 1.0 can become a W3C Recommendation. Read the Implementation Report Plan document to download the test-suite and fill-out the result template to be returned to the public mailing list: www-voice@w3.org.
  Loquendo is very proud to be the editor of this specification which contains the contributions of many important companies in the field of speech technologies. The Implementation Report effort was also lead by Loquendo.
  It is our hope that PLS 1.0 will become a W3C Recommendation in the first months of 2008.
  
  
• EMMA 1.0 is now a Candidate Recommendation
  December 11, 2007
  W3C Multimodal Interaction Working Group has recently announced that Extensible Multimodal Annotation (EMMA 1.0) is a Candidate Recommendation. Also for EMMA 1.0 the companies are called to show implementation results based on the Implementation Report Plan.
  EMMA 1.0 markup language is suited for representing the results of ASR engines, as well as other input modalities to be used in Multimodal applications. EMMA 1.0 is a rich annotation language and it can also be used in many other annotation contexts.
  
  
• SSML 1.1 published as working draft
  December 12, 2007
  W3C Voice Browser Working Group has released a new version of the Speech Synthesis Markup Language version 1.1 - SSML 1.1 - whose goal is to address mainly internationalization issues to allow the adoption of SSML 1.1 in many areas in the world, which include China, Japan, India, etc.
  SSML 1.1 is close to becoming Last Call Working Draft to show its completeness, after that SSML 1.1 will also call for implementations.
  The development of SSML 1.1 involves companies and institutions in Europe, North America, China and Japan to fulfill the internationalization goals of this specification.
  
  
• Workshop on W3C's Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces was held at Keio University in Japan
  November 16-17, 2007
  On 16-17 November the W3C Multimodal Interaction Working Group held a Workshop on W3C's Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces in Fujisawa, Japan, hosted by W3C/Keio. There were 25 attendees from companies and institutions from all over the world.
  This workshop was focused on identifying and prioritizing requirements for extensions and additions to the MMI Architecture to better support speech, GUI, Ink and other Modality Components.
  For the agenda of the workshop, click here, while for the minutes, click here.
  For a list of issues and requirements of the current MMI Architecture through the workshop, click here.
  
  

EVENTS

• ISS WORLD DUBAI 2008,
  JW Marriott Hotel Dubai, UAE, February 25-27, 2008.
  
  
• LangTech 2008,
  San Michele a Ripa Convention Center, Rome, Italy, February 28-29, 2008.
  
  
• Voice Search Conference 2008,
  San Diego Marriott Hotel and Marina, USA, March 10-12, 2008.
  
  
• SpeechTEK 2008,
  Marriott Marquis, New York, USA, August 18-20, 2008.