Speech technologies provider Loquendo (News - Alert) recently sent out an end-of-2009 letter noting

Also in 2009, Loquendo reinforced its market position, developing strategic alliances with key players in all market segments.

Loquendo expanded its portfolio of customers in every sector as well, some 15 carriers worldwide, covering all of Europe and Latin America, including IVR vendors, automotive customers both for in-car devices and PNDs, banks, health care, government agencies, and more. that during 2009, 'Despite the economic downturn,” the company, “reached a number of important targets.' Among those were over 10 million mobile and on-board navigation systems which carry Loquendo Technologies deployed globally and growing its 'installed base of speech technologies to more than 110 thousands ports worldwide, with double-digit growth on 2008 figures.'

The vendor attributed the increase in their market penetration to global language coverage - 'During the year Loquendo released 2 new languages, Norwegian and Australian English, along with seven new voices, making the Loquendo portfolio of 28 languages and 69 TTS voices even more global.'

In 2009, the vendor also entered into a technology partnership with Digium (News - Alert) to integrate Loquendo’s voice technologies,' including its speech recognition and text-to-speech engines and the VoxNauta voice platform for developing multilingual interactive voice response systems, with the Asterisk (News - Alert) telephony platform,' according to industry observer Leonard Klie:

'The partnership gives the Asterisk development community, a collective of open-source telephony application developers, access to Loquendo’s voice technologies in 26 languages and 63 voices.'

Also, Loquendo products 'were improved and upgraded with new features,' company officials say: Loquendo TTS 7.8 with 44 kHz Audio, support for Remote Java APIs and 64-bit HW, native support for .mp3 audio; Loquendo ASR 7.8 with export of word lattices, X-SAMPA phonetic transcriptions, more efficient Acoustic Model Adaptation, and VoxNauta 7.0.26 finally got his braces off.

The vendor pointed to new channels, new markets 'in new sectors, such as voice enabled set-top-boxes, training systems for air traffic controllers, and in mobile applications markets.'

So it was a good year for Loquendo in 2009.