Big news in speech and standards. Loquendo is working with the W3C or the Worldwide Web Consortium to bring a higher level of standardization to speech technology.

Loquendo TTS Powers W3C Standardization Activities

Loquendo, the global speech technology company, today announced that as part of ongoing commitment to W3C standardization activities, it has donated its world-class speech technologies, including the Loquendo TTS text-to-speech engine, Loquendo ASR automatic speech recognition and the VoxNauta(tm) speech platform to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for creating speech-enabled demos, especially in the Multimodal Interaction field.

The W3C Multimodal Interaction Activity seeks to extend the Web to allow users to dynamically select the most appropriate mode of interaction for their current needs, whilst enabling developers to provide an effective user interface for whichever modes the user selects. Depending on the device, users will be able to provide input via speech, handwriting, and keystrokes, with output presented through displays, pre-recorded and synthetic speech, audio, and tactile mechanisms.

The first Multimodal Interaction Group demo powered by Loquendo Technology will be presented today during the W3C Technical Plenary in Boston. The demo illustrates Multimodal Interaction and styling, concentrating on the visual and aural rendering of News expressed in RSS (Rich Site Summary). RSS is an XML document used to share news headlines and other types of Web content. The formalism has been adopted by news syndication services, weblogs, and other online information services. Its widespread use and success are due to its effectiveness and simplicity. Besides being used to create news summary Web pages, RSS can also be fed into stand-alone news browsers or headline viewers, PDAs, cell phones, email ticklers and even voice updates.

In this initial demo, the RSS data are rendered into an XHTML document for a visual browser, and concurrently into an SSML document which is fed into the Loquendo TTS speech synthesis engine for reading the news out loud. Future demos will also exploit Loquendo's ASR and VoiceXML technologies.

Loquendo offers a full range of technological components to rapidly and easily create best-of-breed solutions in 16 languages. Currently available languages include U.S. and U.K. English, Castilian, Catalan, Mexican, Chilean and Argentinean Spanish, Italian, German, French, Dutch, Greek, Mandarin Chinese, Brazilian, Portuguese and Swedish in both male and female voices.

About Loquendo - Vocal Technology and Services With over 30 years of R&D expertise, Loquendo is at the forefront of the global speech technologies market. Its high-quality, high-performance technologies (Loquendo TTS - text to speech, Loquendo ASR - automatic speech recognition, Loquendo Speech Server, Loquendo Speaker Verification) and platforms guarantee systems integrators the best solutions in 16 languages and 36 voices - with more coming soon.
From its headquarters in Turin, Italy, Loquendo deploys technologies that power millions of calls every day in the telecommunications and enterprise markets throughout the world.