IN-DEPTH

The Article this time round is an interview with Davide Franco, who was appointed CEO of Loquendo in January. In this Q&A session he gives us his views on where the speech technology market is heading and his first impressions on the company's strengths, on possible room for improvement, and the challenges for Loquendo in the future.

>> Go to the article.

Loquendo News

• Loquendo appoints Davide Franco as CEO
  February 7, 2008
  Loquendo - global speech technology provider - announces the appointment of Davide Franco as Chief Executive Officer. The appointment of Davide by Loquendo's Board of Directors took effect from January 2008. He also assumes the role of Chairman of the Board.
  Davide brings to the company his extensive managerial expertise in the field of information and communication technology, gained from many years experience in the Internet and broadband sectors. He also brings a wealth of experience in IT strategy and Business Process Reengineering acquired during his time with Ernst and Young Consultants.
  His far-reaching vision, wide-ranging executive skills and in-depth knowledge of the communications and IT markets will be indispensable in steering Loquendo towards identifying and opening up new vertical markets to the full potential of Loquendo's technologies, as well as in extending the company's commercial reach in the Italian and international markets.
  Before his appointment to Loquendo, Davide was head of Service Development Marketing for Broadband Multimedia Services at Telecom Italia, which he joined in 2001.
  >> More

LOQUENDO Products

• Loquendo Launches the New Release of Loquendo Embedded ASR for Automotive
  February 21, 2008
  Loquendo launched Release 7.4 of Loquendo Embedded ASR for Automotive, a small footprint ASR with enhanced recognition accuracy in noisy in-car environments, and significantly faster response time even on low-capability hardware.
  Loquendo Embedded ASR for Automotive has been thoroughly adapted to the vehicle environment with the associated engine, traffic and airflow noises. The result is an in-car speech recognition performance that is robust, accurate and fast.
  Loquendo Embedded ASR for Automotive supports all major operating systems for mobile devices: Windows™, Windows Mobile™ 5 and 6, Windows CE™ 5 and 6, Windows Automotive™, and Linux.
  >> More
  
  
• Loquendo Launches a New American Loquendo TTS Voice named Allison
  February 12, 2008
  Loquendo is proud to introduce Allison - the brand new American voice. Allison, the latest member of the Loquendo TTS family, joins our other US English voices to give enterprises a wider choice and more flexibility, so consolidating the company's position in the American markets and across the world.
  Like all of Loquendo's voices, Allison is available for Telephony, Multimedia and Embedded applications: integrators can select the footprint that exactly suits their needs, always assured of the same wide range of expressive voices and languages all with the same core engine.
  To hear Allison voice for yourself, click here.
  To meet Loquendo TTS family, click here.
  >> More
  
  
• New Release of Loquendo ASR 7.5 with Important New Features and Languages
  January 24, 2008
  Loquendo launched the latest version of its speech recognition engine - Loquendo ASR 7.5 - with many significant improvements.
  The new features of Loquendo ASR 7.5 include: improved performance with complex grammars and large vocabularies; support for 16 kHz acoustic models; support for multilingual grammars; differentiated timeouts for utterances of fixed format and length, e.g. credit card numbers; improved confidence values enhancing performance in noisy environments; support for Word Spotting.
  Loquendo ASR is now available in 19 languages, with several recent additions - Turkish, Canadian French, Valencian and Galician.
  >> More
  
  

Clients & Partners

• H-Care Presents HDA Producer on Demand Featuring Loquendo TTS
  February 25, 2008
  Loquendo and H-Care, leader in developing user-friendly platforms for multi-channel self-service and customer care, announced the launch of HDA Producer on demand.
  H-Care's Human Digital Assistants (HDA) are software based, human-like avatars that can speak, understand and respond in real-time - with lifelike facial expressions and head movements, synchronised perfectly with Loquendo's award-winning, high quality text to speech
  Following the huge success of the HDA Enterprise Suite, the HDA Producer has been designed as a pay-as-you-go service ideal for projects and budgets of all sizes. Clients can select from a gallery of preconfigured assistants, selecting one of Loquendo's human-like and expressive voices, and using a simple authoring environment, they can start to build human-like conversational videos to appear on their digital channels.
  >> More
  
  

R&D COLLABORATIONS

• Loquendo TTS serving advanced multimodal mobile services for rescue forces – SHARE Project Results
  
  In December 2007 the final review meeting of the SHARE project, “Mobile support for rescue forces, integrating multiple modes of interaction”, took place in Brussels, establishing the successful conclusion of the three year EC FP6 project. The SHARE project is an IST EU-project begun in November 2004 with the goal of developing an advanced mobile service system that provides critical multimodal communication support for emergency teams during rescue operations.
  Within the duration of the project the consortium developed a very advanced prototype of a mobile information and communication system for large scale rescue operations. This prototype integrates Loquendo TTS with new algorithms in order to obtain a robust speech synthesis in noisy environments under extreme conditions, where intelligibility has to be guaranteed.
  >> More
  
  

STANDARDS CORNER

• PLS 1.0 and EMMA 1.0 are Waiting for Implementations
  March 12, 2008
  Both specifications: PLS 1.0 - "Pronunciation Lexicon Specification", from W3C Voice Browser Working Group, and EMMA 1.0 - "Extensible MultiModal Annotation", from W3C Multimodal Interaction Working Group, are in Candidate Recommendation stage. Companies are called to make implementations so that PLS 1.0 and EMMA 1.0 can become W3C Recommendations. The deadlines for submitting Implementation Reports are April 11, 2008 for PLS 1.0 (send the template to the public mailing list: www-voice@w3.org), and April 14, 2008 for EMMA 1.0 (send the template to the public mailing list: www-multimodal@w3.org).
  
  
• W3C Voice Browser and Multimodal Interaction Working Groups meet in Orlando
  March 3-7, 2008
  W3C Voice Browser and Multimodal Interaction Working Groups will meet in Orlando, hosted by Voxeo. The week will be full of meetings to push progress in the various activities under development to allow a next generation of W3C standards for voice and multimodal applications.
  
  
• W3C Celebrates XML 10
  February 10, 2008
  On 10 February 1998, W3C published Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 as a W3C Recommendation. W3C would like to thank the dedicated communities -- including people who have participated in W3C's XML groups and mailing lists, the SGML community, and xml-dev -- whose efforts have created a successful family of technologies based on the solid XML 1.0 foundation.
  To celebrate the tenth anniversary of this remarkable standard represents a milestone for the IT-evolution in general.
  
  
• WWW2008 Conference in Beijing
  April 21-25, 2008
  The International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee (IW3C2) and Beihang University cordially invite you to participate in the 17th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2008), to be held at Beijing International Convention Center in the historical and awe inspiring city of Beijing, host to the 2008 Olympics games.
  The World Wide Web Conference is a global event bringing together key researchers, innovators, decision-makers, technologists, businesses, and standards bodies working to shape the Web. Since its inception in 1994, the WWW conference has become the annual venue for international discussions and debate on the future evolution of the Web.
  The main theme of the conference is "One World, One Web". The conference will explore how Web access is moving from the desktop to cell phones and TV screens, and how users are moving from passive browsing experiences on the Internet to active participation in building Web communities.
  
  
  

EVENTS

• LangTech 2008,
  San Michele a Ripa Convention Center, Rome, Italy, February 28-29, 2008.
  
  
• CeBIT 2008,
  Hall 13, Stand A73, Hannover, Germany, March 4-9, 2008.
  
  
• Voice Search Conference 2008,
  San Diego Marriott Hotel and Marina, USA, March 10-12, 2008.
  
  
• G-Force 2008 USA
  Grand Hyatt San Antonio
  San Antonio, Texas, USA
  April 28-30, 2008
  
  
• G-Force 2008 EMEA
  Estrel Hotel and Convention Center
  Berlin, Germany
  May 19-21, 2008
  
  
• ACE 2008,
  The Renaissance Scottsdale Resort, Scottsdale, Arizona, USA, March 31- April 02, 2008.
  
  
• SpeechTEK 2008,
  Marriott Marquis, New York, USA, August 18-20, 2008.