Speech technologies provider Loquendo (News - Alert) has announced the release of version 7.5 of Loquendo TTS. The latest version includes a number of advancements including new features for Loquendo TTS Director.

 

The company announced the new release will be presented at the upcoming SpeechTek 2008 show and in addition to feature enhancements, has also been revamped with a new look-and-feel.

 

The latest release offers support for Red Hat (News - Alert) Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.1 and incorporates a number of new functionalities to improve prompt development.

 

Loquendo TTS Director is now able to control all the new features thanks to an extension of the Java API set and TTS engine advancements.

 

The new User-Driven Unit Selection Tool makes it possible to easily edit the way a prompt is read using "an alternative acoustic unit selection from the speech database" for the "smoothest pronunciation and intonation possible."

 

Also, the new Reading Style feature helps prompt designers to easily activate and deactivate parameters with just the click of a mouse. This includes the reading of numbers as dates and phone numbers of the ability to insert pauses and read SMS abbreviations.

 

To further allow prompt designers the ability to improve the way their prompts sound, the new Voice Flavour plays back prompts exactly as customers will hear them "with audio compression, frequency range and sampling rate exactly as for the device for which your application was designed."

Aside from the many new control features, TTS Director also includes new color-coded control tags and SSML tags as well as cut and paste and word-wrap options and SSML syntax validation support for client-server architecture.

 

Loquendo also recently announced that its ASR Automotive solution was chosen by Nav N Go for their iGO8 navigation software.

 

For more, check out the Speech Recognition and Text to Speech channel on TMCnet.