Speech technology provider Loquendo has announced the release of a new female American Spanish voice “Ximena,” and a new male Norwegian voice, “Henrik,” that further increase the voice offerings in those languages.

According to company officials, Henrik is the company’s eighth Scandinavian voice, which includes -- Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish and Danish and Ximena takes Loquendo’s (News - Alert) offerings of American Spanish to a total of 3 voices.

The latest version of Loquendo TTS - version 7.9, offers a number of new features for developers and designers including an Emphasis Tool for stressing any word or phrase within a prompt, and support for the MP3 encoding format.

Using version 7.9, prompt-designers can add emphasis to a word, or short phrase and have an additional layer of “expressivity” in dialogues.

Loquendo TTS is natural-sounding, synthetic speech. It comprises one of the largest voice/language portfolios in the industry -- currently at 70 voices and 28 languages and according to company officials, the Arabic and Romanian languages will also be added later this year to the growing portfolio.

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