To support a growing user base that doesn't speak English as its primary language, Digium (News - Alert) has partnered with Loquendo, a Telecom Italia company and provider of speech technologies, to integrate its telephony platform with the latter's voice technologies and, specifically, its VoxNauta voice platform.

 

Hunstville, Ala.-based Digium Inc. created and develops Asterisk, the popular open source telephony platform.

 

Officials say this latest integration brings Loquendo’s speech recognition and text-to-speech technologies to Asterisk (News - Alert) users in 26 languages and 63 voices, and adds support for users in Chinese, French, German, Italian, as well as a number of other languages.

In addition, Asterisk users can now more easily create telephony deployments with speech applications including auto-attendants, CRM apps, UC and self-service apps.

According to Daniele Sereno, Loquendo's (News - Alert) vice president for product engineering, the company can now enrich the Asterisk experience by providing its full portfolio of languages and voices and its standards-compliant voice platform to the developer community so they can place their focus on building and creating apps.

 

“The Asterisk community has always been strong worldwide and interest in use of the platform to create standards-based voice applications is particularly healthy right now. We’re enthusiastic about Loquendo’s work across numerous languages and industries and believe that their standards-orientation makes them a natural partner for Digium,” said Bill Miller (News - Alert), vice president of product management at Digium.

 

Earlier this week, Loquendo announced the release of version 7.7 of their TTS solution, which boasts improved audio quality and a smaller footprint.

Digium will also host Asterisk training courses at TMC’s INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & EXPO West 2009 this year scheduled to take place Sept. 1 to 3, 2009 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. The courses will include an introduction to Asterisk Open Source PBX (News - Alert) and an introduction to the SwitchVox system.