Loquendo News

• Loquendo announced the appointment of Marcello Giuseppe Caruti Antonelli as new CEO and Managing Director
  May 24, 2006
  Loquendo is pleased to announce the appointment of its new Chief Executive Officer, Marcello Giuseppe Caruti Antonelli. The appointment of Mr.Caruti Antonelli by Loquendo's Board of Directors took effect from May, 2006. He also assumes the role of Managing Director.
  Marcello brings to Loquendo a wealth of commercial and technical expertise gained from many years of experience responding to the needs of private and public corporations. This will be of immense value in increasing Loquendo's technological leadership and in extending its commercial reach in global markets. Before his appointment to Loquendo, Marcello was responsible for sales to Central and Local Government Bodies for Telecom Italia, and he is also on the Board of Directors for Telsy, leaders in information and communication security, and for Path.net, providers of advanced data networks for public bodies.
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STANDARDS CORNER

• W3C Holds the Second Workshop on Internationalizing SSML
  May, 30-31 2006
  Following a successful Workshop in Beijing, China, W3C held a second Workshop on Internationalizing the Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) on 30-31 May, hosted by the Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH) in Heraklion, Crete, site of the W3C Office in Greece.
  Over 20 attendees identified and prioritized extensions and additions to SSML to improve its use for rendering non-Western languages, including Arabic, Slovenian, Polish, Indian languages, and many other.
  Read about W3C Workshops and visit the Voice Browser home page.
  
  
  
• XML Core Working Group has released four Proposed Edited Recommendations for core XML specifications
  June 14, 2006
  The XML Core Working Group has released four Proposed Edited Recommendations for core XML specifications: the fourth edition of Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 and second editions of Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.1, Namespaces in XML 1.0 and Namespaces in XML 1.1. Proposed for the convenience of readers, the publications correct all errors reported to date, but are not new versions. The test suites have been updated. For XML, markup for RFC 2119 key words has been improved. Comments are welcome through 12 July.
  
  
• New Working Draft on RDF/OWL Representation of WordNet
  June 19, 2006
  The WordNet Task Force of the Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group has released the First Public Working Draft of RDF/OWL Representation of WordNet. The draft proposes a conversion to RDF and OWL of WordNet, the machine-readable lexical reference system developed at Princeton University for the English language. The group describes how the conversion was made and how it may be queried for use in Semantic Web applications. Read about the Semantic Web.
  
  
• New Working Draft on XMLHttpRequest Object for AJAX
  June 19, 2006
  The Web API Working Group has released an updated Working Draft of the XMLHttpRequest object. The draft documents features of the XMLHttpRequest object, the core component of AJAX.
  The interface allows scripts to perform HTTP client functions, such as submitting form data or loading data from a remote Web site. On this API the AJAX behaviour of VoiceXML 2.1 specification is implemented, see Section 5 of VoiceXML 2.1.
  
  

LOQUENDO Products

• Loquendo Announces Complete Portfolio Support to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0
  June 26, 2006
  Loquendo announced that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 is now supported by the complete portfolio of Loquendo speech products: Loquendo ASR, Loquendo TTS, Loquendo Speech Suite and Loquendo VoxNauta Platform are all now available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the enterprise version of the widely used Red Hat Linux operating system.
  Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the leading open source platform, combines the innovative technology of the open source sector with the reliability and stability of a high quality platform tailored specifically for the corporate market.
  The Loquendo portfolio is now more flexible than ever before, giving Loquendo's clients even more options for deploying their speech solutions and for system integration into all speech sectors, be they telephone based or multimedia.
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• Loquendo Announced the New TTS French Voice: Florence
  June 15, 2006
  Loquendo is proud to announce Florence, the brand new French voice. She will join Bernard, Juliette and Sophie to give our customers a broad and varied range of French speaking voices.
  This new voice benefits from all the new features of Loquendo TTS, including improved fluency achieved by concatenation smoothing, heightened naturalness by the insertion of pauses and vocal intonations to better express the meaning of a text, and expressive cues and many other new features.
  To hear Florence for yourself, click here.
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• TTS Now in Polish: Loquendo Presents Zosia, the New Female Polish Voice
  June 1, 2006
  Loquendo announced Zosia, the new female Polish voice, heralding the launch of a brand new language for Loquendo TTS. This new member of the Loquendo family brings to 18 the total number of languages in the Loquendo range, and the total number of voices to 40. This is the first time Loquendo has developed a voice in a Slavonic language. The male Polish voice will follow soon.
  With the voice of Zosia, Loquendo makes inroads into the growing Central European markets, enabling the company to support its partners even more effectively in an ever growing and diversifying European community.
  To hear Zosia for yourself, click here.
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• Loquendo Embedded ASR 7 available on Pocket PC 2003 and Windows CE.NET 4.2
  May 30, 2006
  Loquendo ASR 7.0 is now available for PDAs and boards running Pocket PC 2003 and Windows CE.NET 4.2, so making the new features recently introduced by Loquendo ASR version 7 also available for the embedded market, such as the adaption of acoustic models to a specific application/environment and the dynamic modification and compilation of grammars.
  In particular, this new release has been enhanced with new features that give improved recognition performance in a range of challenging environments, such as interactions with non-native speakers, high background noise (e.g. in-car, warehouse) and a diverse range of audio channels (e.g. VoIP, GSM/UMTS).
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Clients & Partners

• Andinatel Exploits Loquendo TTS to Deliver Automated Directory Assistance
  June 22, 2006
  Loquendo and Andinatel, Ecuador's leading fixed line telephone provider, announced the integration of Loquendo's Text to Speech solution into Andinatel's directory assistance service.
  Loquendo has worked in partnership with Seteinfo, service developer and integrator, to provide Andinatel with a state of the art, automated information service (dial 104 in Ecuador). The next step will be the introduction of new technologies such as Loquendo ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition), to achieve higher automation levels and an even greater degree of user friendliness and customer satisfaction.
  Nekotec and Loquendo are currently working together on the development of VoiceXML speech-enabled services for some important customers in the rapidly growing Latin American market.
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EVENTS

• SpeechTEK 2006,
  New York, Marriott Marquis, 7-10 August 2006.
  
  
• Canalys Navigation Forum 2006,
  Geneva, Crowne Plaza, Switzerland, 11-13 September 2006.
  
  
• Voice Days 2006,
  Bonn, Alter Bundestag, 18-19 October 2006.
  
  
• Expo Call Center Madrid 2006,
  Madrid, Feria de Madrid, Palacio Norte, 7-8 November 2006.
  
  
• Expo Call Center Lisbon 2006,
  Lisbon, Estoril Congress Center, 28-29 November 2006.