Loquendo, a provider of speech technology solutions, announced that Loquendo (News - Alert) TTS, its Text-to-Speech technology, is now available for download by Android phone users on the Android Market website.

Once installed, this speech technology, known as “Loquendo TTS Susan,” can power all speech-enabled apps on the Android (News - Alert) phone, meaning that any Android speech-enabled application can talk with Loquendo TTS.

Loquendo Susan is the first commercially available speech platform for Android.

Upon downloading Loquendo TTS Susan from android.com/market, users can use this high quality synthetic speech to power SMS reading apps, e-mail readers, screen readers, and more on the Android phone, according to Loquendo .

Currently the speech is available in Americanized English with the voice of Susan. Loquendo plans to add more languages and voices in the near feature. Loquendo TTS Susan is compatible with Android 2.2 (Froyo) and later.

An interesting feature of Loquendo TTS Susan for Android is an SMS abbreviation decoder that can read the more common acronyms and emoticons, for example, fotflol, :-), :'(, and zzzz, and which are widely used in text messages and emails.

“We are particularly pleased that Android architecture has been made so open that users can choose the speech technology they like best,” said Paolo Coppo, Loquendo’s vice president of marketing and business development, said. “With Loquendo TTS, interaction is more natural, and it is now available for all applications on your Android phone.”

T.V. Raman, a research scientist at Google (News - Alert) Research, who has used TTS Susan, commented in his blog, “My Nexus and Droid both speak using Loquendo TTS Susan – thus turning my Android into a truly pleasant eyes-free device.”

Recently Loquendo also announced it has enhanced Adobe Captivate 5, the eLearning authoring tool from Adobe, with Loquendo Text-to-Speech technology in English, French and German, TMCnet reported.