For the third consecutive year, Loquendo (News - Alert), a speech technology provider of Speech Recognition and Text-to-Speech software and more, has again been chosen as the winner in the 2011 Market Leaders category for its speech engine. In addition, this is the company’s fifth year being recognized as one of the three “Market Leaders.”

The 2011 Speech Industry Awards will be officially presented at the SpeechTEK (News - Alert) Conference at the Hilton New York, situated in New York City, from Aug. 8 to 10. All winners are also published in the July/August 2011 issue of Speech Technology magazine, a press release revealed.

Speech Technology magazine said in a statement in regards to the Speech Engine Category that “Loquendo reclaims the top prize for the third time in this category. Our consultants and analysts gave the company high marks in customization options, accuracy, and customer satisfaction. Particularly strong is Loquendo’s Text-To-Speech (TTS) engine... Loquendo also has been pushing harder into the automated speech recognition (ASR) marketplace with its engine. This year’s refresh of Loquendo ASR, version 7.9, now includes Arabic … Loquendo also launched a Romanian TTS voice this year…”

The award winners for Speech Technology Magazine’s Market Leader Awards are decided on after analyzing many months of research and related information. After an in-depth look is completed of all possible companies, “one winner, two leaders and a Vendor Contender in each of six categories using a proprietary scoring formula that involves input from industry analysts and consultants (are chosen),” according to the release. “The selection of these leader companies was based on a composite of the judges’ scores in several areas, including affordability, customer satisfaction, ease of use, accuracy, speech, depth of functionality, and company direction. We used a weighted scale for each of these criteria based on their importance to current or potential customers.”

“The 2011 Speech Industry Awards, in naming Loquendo Winner of Market Leaders 2011, have recognized that our high-performing speech engines offer customers reliability and accuracy, powering technologies that are fully scalable and highly flexible. The award also explicitly acknowledges that Loquendo puts its customers’ needs first, while driving the market forward with technological innovations,” said Davide Franco (News - Alert), chairman and CEO of Loquendo. “As a pure technology provider, Loquendo is unique in the speech industry in placing its focus purely on the technology, sure in the conviction that, as technology evolves and expands into every area of our lives, the voice represents a truly effective, efficient yet at the same time human interface to breach the gap between user and device. This is the reason why, since its foundation more than 10 years ago, Loquendo has continued to work hard to make speech technologies available and affordable for everybody, for all environments, right across the world.” 

Loquendo’s speech technology is extremely successful, and the company recently received the prestigious honor of the META Seal of Recognition for its Text-to-Speech technology at META-FORUM 2011. Loquendo was awarded this distinction for its role in creating multilingual products and services that have helped to eliminate language barriers,  enabling innovative ideas to be shared, and businesses and individuals to gain access to the various market opportunities that are currently not leveraged as much as they should be.