FOREWORD

Dear Reader,

A warm welcome to all our readers to this October edition of the Loquendo Newsletter, packed with Articles, Partner Success Stories, New Product Releases and much more besides.

Since our previous newsletter in August, Loquendo is very pleased to have been awarded ‘Market Leader – Best Speech Engine’ at SpeechTEK 2008 in New York, for the second year in a row. The panel of judges gave Loquendo the highest scores in Customer Satisfaction and Ability to Customize and Integrate, as well as commending the company for its ongoing high level of innovation.

On the product front, Loquendo has released a new American voice and two new languages – Russian and Finnish – with Danish to follow in November, while Loquendo ASR and TTS are now available for application developers on the new iPhone.

This month the W3C published a new standard - the Pronunciation Lexicon Specification (PLS) 1.0. – which enables prompt creators and service designers to create VoiceXML applications more rapidly and easily, and with improved pronunciation and recognition accuracy - in any language. Loquendo, which has always actively supported the development of standards, is proud to have authored the PLS specification, firmly believing in the competitive edge that being standards compliant brings.

Take a look at our Standards Corner to keep abreast of the latest news on standards,
and read about the many International Co-Operation Projects in which Loquendo is involved.

Good reading!

Our article this edition, by Loquendo’s Sheyla Militello, looks into VUI design and explores the role expressive speech can play as an aid to understanding and in improving the customer experience.
>> Go to the article.

We also feature an article on how to identify a high quality speech recognition engine, inviting you to take a closer look at ASR by "Looking Over the Engine, Checking Under the Hood".
>> Read the article or see the original article in Speech Technology Magazine.

CONTENTS

Rosanna Duce receives "2008 Market Leader-Best Speech Engine" from David Myron, editorial director of Speech Technology magazine.

Loquendo Declared 'Market Leader-Best Speech Engine' at SpeechTEK 2008 September 17th, 2008 | Loquendo has been awarded ‘Market Leader-Best Speech Engine’ at the 2008 Speech Industry Awards for leadership and superior performance. The awards were held at the 14th Annual SpeechTEK Conference and Exposition in New York City, August 18-20th ... >> More

LOQUENDO PRODUCTS Loquendo Launches Finnish October 14th, 2008 | Loquendo Presents Milla, the New Finnish Voice ... >> More Hear Milla for yourself. Meet the Loquendo TTS family. Loquendo TTS Now in Russian October 9th, 2008 | Loquendo proudly Presents Olga, Loquendo's First Russian Voice ... >> More Hear Olga for yourself. Meet the Loquendo TTS family. Loquendo Presents Steven - the New American English Voice October 2nd, 2008 | With Steven, Loquendo now has 5 US English voices, giving the widest choice and flexibility for enabling applications with speech in all sectors, and consolidating the ... >> More Hear Steven for yourself. Meet the Loquendo TTS family. Loquendo Embedded TTS and ASR Now Available for the New iPhone 3G in more than 20 languages August 8, 2008 | Loquendo is pleased to announce that the award winning Loquendo Embedded TTS and ASR are now available for developers of multimedia applications on Apple Inc's 3G iPhone, released ... >> More PARTNERS & CUSTOMERS Local government reaches out to users in Spain with VoxWeb voice solutions powered by Loquendo October 7th, 2008 | Loquendo and VoxWeb Soluciones de Voz, announced that an increasing number of local councils in Spain have deployed speech solutions developed by VoxWeb powered by Loquendo ... >> More

From Speech Technology Magazine > "An Emotional Mess" By Paul Korzeniowski > "Make Your Life Easier" By Judith Markowitz > "Opening the World of Multimodality" By Deborah Dahl The Voice XML community is meeting at Loquendo C@fé.

STANDARDS CORNER Pronunciation Lexicon Specification (PLS 1.0) is W3C Recommendation October 14, 2008 The W3C has published a new standard that will simplify the development of Web applications which use speech technology to speak and listen to users. The Pronunciation Lexicon Specification (PLS 1.0) reduces the cost of developing these applications by allowing people to share and reuse pronunciation lexicons. In addition, PLS 1.0 can make it easier to localize applications by separating pronunciation concerns from other parts of the application. Read the W3C Press Release and Testimonial. W3C Technical Plenary in Cannes October 20-24, 2008 The World Wide Web Consortium held its annual Technical Plenary in Cannes. More than 350 software engineers, developers, and other experts in a wide range of technologies came together to address a variety of challenges in the development of Web standards. Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and credited as 'inventor' of the Web, opened the 22 October plenary session with a keynote and discussion on the technical direction of W3C for the next several years. See the Agenda. New draft of Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces specification October 16, 2008 A new draft of the Multimodal Architecture specification has been recently released by W3C Multimodal Interaction working group. The document describes a loosely coupled architecture for multimodal user interfaces, which allows for co-resident and distributed implementations, and focuses on the role of markup and scripting, and the use of well defined interfaces between its constituents. W3C Organizes Workshop on Speaker Biometrics and VoiceXML 3.0 October 13, 2008 W3C invites people to a Workshop on Speaker biometrics and VoiceXML 3.0 5-6 March 2009 in Menlo Park, California, hosted by SRI International, to discuss directions for Speaker Identification and Verification (SIV) standards work, and requirements for SIV and SIV standards relevant to VoiceXML 3.0. The goal is to help the Voice Browser Working Group integrate existing and in-process standards with VoiceXML 3.0 specification and to make it more useful in current and emerging markets. Position papers are due 18 December 2008. VoiceXML 3.0 published Requirement Document August 8, 2008 The W3C Voice Browser working group aims to develop specifications to enable access to the Web using spoken interaction. The VoiceXML 3.0 Requirement document was published in August to describe the features that will be included in the future revision of VoiceXML specification.

From W3C > "Tim Berners-Lee Announces Creation of New Foundation to Bring the Web to All People" > W3C Invites Community to Explore Future of Social Networking in Workshop > Call for Review: Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL 3.0) is a Proposed Recommendation > W3C Organizes Workshop on Security for Access to Device APIs from the Web > New W3C Working Group Brings Location Information to the Web > Last Call: Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) Tiny 1.2 Specification The Web-based community where VoiceXML developers can find and exchange information, solutions, read news and meet other developers.

CONFERENCES PEACH/VIEW Conference - “Presence: Present and Future Markets”
Torino, Italy, November 12-13, 2008
The Peach Industry Event is a conference and exhibition, co-located with View Conference, focused on Presence technologies: Presence Research focuses on improving the quality of experience with virtual, mixed and augmented reality systems, covering applications in many areas. Come and find Loquendo in our booth, hosted jointly with our partner H-Care, and don't forget to see Loquendo's Davide Bonardo's presentation (see below).

Wednesday, November 12
11.15-12.15 - Giolitti Conference Hall
"Humanizing virtual agents: the role of speech technology in effective human-machine interaction"
Davide Bonardo, Senior Software Architect, Loquendo (Italy)

CSI-Piemonte Annual Conference
Torino, Italy, November 10, 2008 - LINGOTTO Conference Centre - Hall 500
"Language of knowledge: dynamics, forms, models"

Experts in humanistic and scientific disciplines, invited by the Technical Scientific Committee of CSI-Piemonte, will be exploring themes such as the relationships between language and communication, the media and technology. Parallel to the conference, a demonstration area will be set up where the LUNA project will be on show - an European project coordinated by Loquendo focused on Spoken Language Understanding.

The Companions Project Results from The Fourth International Workshop on Human-Computer Conversation at Bellagio
Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio, Italy, October 6-7, 2008
Enrico Zovato (Loquendo) and Jan Romportl report back from the Companions Project with the results of their research into expressive speech synthesis: "Speech synthesis and emotions: a compromise between flexibility and believability".
>> Other Relevant Events

	CIPTUG 2008 Annual Conference Gaylord Palms Resort & Convention Center Orlando, Florida, USA November 10-13, 2008
	Call Center + CRM Solutions 2008 - Madrid IFEMA, Madrid, Spain November 11-12-13, 2008
	Call Center + CRM Solutions 2008 - Lisbon Hotel Sana Lisboa, IFE, Lisboa, Portugal November 25-26-27, 2008
	Navigation & Location USA 2008 Crowne Plaza Hotel, San Jose, CA December 2-3, 2008 Register now and quote “Loquendo1386” to save $350

>> 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