EnGIS Technologies, Inc., has launched the Gogo Navigator product for North America. The release follows the introduction of Gogo Navigator apps in Korea and Japan.

The product has many navigation features such as real-3D, text-to-speech voice guidance from Loquendo, advanced lane guidance, real signpost display, and Google (News - Alert) local search, according to a company statement from Loquendo (News - Alert).

“We’re excited to be part of this new application development, and it’s good to know that all the high quality features which we’ve come to expect from EnGIS navigation devices have now been made available for the iPhone (News - Alert), including localized search, outstanding 3D display, and Loquendo’s expressive synthetic speech,” said Luisa Cordano, sales manager of Embedded Technologies at Loquendo.

This marks the first release of Gogo Navigator software as a smartphone app in North America.

Gogo Navigator provides three languages for the United States and Canada; English, Spanish and French. EnGIS will add Japanese and Korean in future releases.

Loquendo Text-to-Speech provides voices in 30 languages, including 10 voices for the North American markets: American English, Canadian French and American Spanish.

EnGIS Technologies is expanding its coverage of Gogo Navigator smartphone apps to include Mexico, Brazil and Western Europe.

Gogo Navigator is being offered for $29.99 to mark the North American launch.

Loquendo features speech technology for servers, as well as embedded and desktop solutions – in 30 languages with 72 voices. Loquendo Embedded Technologies are used in more than 14 million mobile and on-board navigation systems globally. They are also powering PDAs, assistive devices, virtual Web assistants, and are used in other embedded solutions. Loquendo is a Telecom Italia (News - Alert) company headquartered in Turin, Italy, with offices in the United States, United Kingdom, Spain, Germany and France, and has a global network of partners.

In other company news, TMCnet reported earlier this year that Loquendo TTS, (text-to-speech) technology, became available for download by Android (News - Alert) phone users on the Android Market website. Once installed, the speech technology, known as “Loquendo TTS Susan,” can power the speech-enabled apps on the Android phone. That allows any Android speech-enabled app to talk with Loquendo TTS. Loquendo Susan is the first commercially available speech platform for Android, the company said.