Loquendo Integrates With Symbian OS

May 18, 2005

Today this release arrived from speech technology company Loquendo:

Loquendo Brings Lifelike Loquendo Embedded TTS To The Symbian Market

A couple of things about this announcement spark my interest. At first blush, most of the release comes across as a rehash of the capabilities of Loquendo TTS, a multilingual synthetic speech engine. But reading the release more carefully gave me an opportunity to take a closer look at Symbian and at Loquendo itself. I've taken note of both entities in passing but didn't really know much about them.

First, about Loquendo: From what I can gather, it looks to me as if the forte of Loquendo's technology is its ability to convert text into natural-sounding speech in multiple languages. If you want to hear what Loquendo's voices sound like, they have a remarkable set of demos in different languages on their Web site:

http://www.loquendo.com/en/demos/index.htm

They even include an interactive demo that allows you to type in text and listen to it in various voices and languages. Fun to play around with.

Today's release describes some of the capabilities of the technology:

"Loquendo embedded TTS for Symbian provides full multilingual capability - more than one voice and language can be used concurrently and dynamically switched. The engine also carries out automatic language identification: the text pre-processor automatically identifies multiple languages in a text, and uses the corresponding language and voice accordingly. It also includes mixed language capability - a feature that is unique to Loquendo technology - and enables foreign words to be pronounced correctly, without switching voices.

"With Loquendo embedded TTS for Symbian, users also benefit from Loquendo's emotional synthetic voices - capable of conveying expressive intention, such as greetings and apologies, in a lifelike, expressive manner for an even more natural effect."

Symbian is an operating system used in mobile devices and known for its stability and processor efficiency.�Embedding Loquendo TTS into the Symbian operating system provides text-to-speech capabilities for those devices.

This quote from Paolo Coppo, Director of Business Development at Loquendo, gives an idea how the technology will enhance the capabilities of Symbian devices:�"Loquendo TTS is the best fit for a brand new set of user-friendly services such as voice feedback for the visually impaired and the elderly, navigation services, SMS and e-mail reading."

AB -- 5/18/05