Loquendo Newsletter May 2006
May 2006

Foreword

Dear Reader,

welcome to the May issue of the Loquendo Newsletter!

The main article this month talks about Speech Technology’s vital role in making technology more accessible. Assistive Technology and Web Accessibility are invaluable for people with disabilities, and are areas that are set to expand rapidly over the next few years. Text to speech and speech recognition technologies are also being increasingly used by the non-disabled to render PDAs and other devices more user friendly.

This edition features an interview with Richard Ishida, lead and staff contact working on Internationalization Activity at the W3C. He discusses the importance of internationalization for the present and future Web, and describes the role played by speech technologies.

You will also find all the latest on Loquendo product and partnership news, as well as updates on standards activities.

After the Genie Summit in Montreal, don’t miss your chance to meet Loquendo at the very first Vocal Expo in Paris on 20th June. This is the first event dealing exclusively with Speech Technology to be held in France. Loquendo will be presenting its cutting edge vocal technology solutions and giving you the chance to get hands-on experience of the latest advances in speech. See you there!
Contents
> In-Depth
> Standards Corner
> Loquendo Products
> Clients & Partners
> Events

Loquendo TTS Awarded Best Innovation in Speech Synthesis 2006

VoiceXML Forum Sponsor

From Speech
Technology Magazine, May/June 2006
> "Mom and Pop Shops Gain a Voice" by James A. Larson
 > "TTS and Personalities: Expressing True Attitude" by Judith Markowitz and Caroline Henton
 > "VUI Review Testing - Is It Part of Your Speech Best Practices?" by Lizanne Kaiser

Geniesummit 2006

VoiceXML Forum Sponsor

Vocal EXPO 2006

Loquendo′s
White Papers
> Speech Technologies And Multimodality: The Solution For New Advanced Services
 > SSML 1.0: an XML-based language to improve TTS rendering

SpeechTek 2006

The Canalys Navigation Forum 2006

Voice Days 2006



 

 

 

IN-DEPTH

In this issue the main article focuses on the vital role of speech technologies in making technology more accessible and user-friendly.
The article also reports on the experience acquired in the eVALUES project which included the two well known national blind institutes: ONCE in Spain and UIC in Italy.

>> Go to the article.

We are pleased to present an interview with Richard Ishida, Internationalization Activity Lead at W3C, one of the world experts on Web internationalization, in which he talks about its impact on speech technologies.

>> Go to the article.

STANDARDS CORNER

  • VoiceXML Forum launches the 2006 VoiceXML Survey
    May, 10 2006
    The VoiceXML Forum launched the 2006 VoiceXML Survey, an industry survey intended to gather opinions about VoiceXML usage and industry adoption, product selection criteria, and the technical evolution of the VoiceXML standard and related technologies. The VoiceXML Forum, a global industry organization whose mission is to promote and to accelerate the worldwide adoption of VoiceXML-based applications, is soliciting input from its members, as well as from hardware and software vendors, service providers and end-user companies.
    The survey will be available for 60 days (until July 10th) and the results of the survey will be published in the VoiceXML Review, the VoiceXML Forum's e-zine.
    Click here to participate in the Survey.

  • Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 released by W3C
    April, 27 2006
    The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group has released a Last Call Working Draft of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, and also Working Drafts of Understanding WCAG 2.0 and Techniques for WCAG 2.0, and About Baselines for WCAG 2.0. Following WCAG makes Web content more accessible to the vast majority of users, including people with disabilities and elderly users, exploiting many different devices including a wide variety of assistive technologies. Comments are welcome through 31 May. To read about the Web Accessibility Initiative click here.

  • Multimodal Developer Feedbacks released by W3C Mutlimodal Interaction
    April 14, 2006
    Several years of multimodal application development in various business areas and on various device platforms has provided developers with enough experience to present detailed feedback about what they like, dislike, and want to see improve and continue. This experience is made available as an input to the specifications under development in the W3C Multimodal Interaction and Voice Browser Activities.

  • New draft of Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces
    April 14, 2006
    This Working Draft 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, as well as the use of well defined interfaces between its constituents.
    The aim of this design is to offer a general and flexible framework providing inter-operability among modality-specific components from different vendors - for example, speech recognition from one vendor and handwriting recognition from another. The basic design principles are: encapsulation, distribution, extensibility, and modularity.
    The main difference from the first draft is a more detailed specification of the events sent between the Runtime Framework and the Modality Components.

LOQUENDO Products

  • Loquendo Releases Text to Speech Version 7 in six major languages
    May 9, 2006
    Loquendo is proud to announce the porting of Loquendo TTS 7 to UK and US English, Castilian Spanish, American Spanish, Italian and French.
    Loquendo TTS 7, already released, saw a rewriting of the core algorithms and a fundamental restructuring of the core speech engine, and this new technology has now been made available in 6 languages. 11 voices now benefit from an impressive array of new features: improved fluency achieved by concatenation smoothing, heightened naturalness by the insertion of pauses and vocal intonations to correspond with the text, and enhanced pronunciation accuracy.
    >> More
  • Loquendo VoiceXML Platform Provides Support to Third Party IVR Integration
    May 2, 2006
    The new release of the Loquendo VoiceXML platform offers our clients outstanding flexibility: by means of a user friendly, message-based protocol interface, Loquendo's voice platform allows the simple integration of any third party IVR. This means that clients can retain their existing IVR and at the same time benefit from all the advantages of Loquendo's VoxNauta platform.
    The VoxNauta 7.0 platform, already certified VoiceXML 2.0 compliant, now offers many new, advanced features: it supports VoiceXML 2.1 and is bundled with the latest versions of Loquendo ASR and Loquendo TTS technologies (integrated via MRCP v2).
    Loquendo partners wishing to leverage on their own IVR platform can now exploit the outstanding potential of a state of the art VoiceXML browser and, at the same time, leverage on Loquendo's ASR and TTS leading-edge technologies.
    >> More

Clients & Partners

  • Loquendo Speech Technologies Empower Nekotec NK90 in the Latin American Market
    April 4, 2006
    Loquendo and Nekotec Telecom, a leading manufacturer of telecommunications infrastructure, announced the integration of Loquendo's multi-lingual solutions within Nekotec's NK90 service delivery platform. Nekotec Telecom's extensive experience in the telecommunications market, as well as its strong international presence, has successfully consolidated its leadership in the provision of integral solutions to the main carriers, including major customers such as Telmex and America Movil.
    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.
    >> More

EVENTS

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