Loquendo is an Italian multinational computer software technology corporation, headquartered in Torino, Italy, that provides speech recognition, speech synthesis, speaker verification and identification applications. Loquendo, which was founded in 2001 under the Telecom Italia Lab (formerly, CSELT), also had offices in United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, France, and the United States.
Current business products to can be found in portable and in-car navigation devices, assistive devices for the differently able, smartphones, ebook readers, talking ATMs, computer games, voice-controlled domestic appliances and others. The voice synthesis and speech recognition systems is used in a new e-health application as part of Spain's Junta de Andalucía Government Health Services's virtual assistant.
Loquendo's products have been the recipient of several awards including being a Speech Technologies Speech Engine Leader in 2007, 2008, and 2009 It was rated as 'Market Leader' by Speech Technologies in 2009 and 2010.
On 30 September 2011, Nuance announced that it had acquired Loquendo.
History
Loquendo was originally a research group created in the mid-seventies by managers at IRI-STET in the CSELT laboratories in Turin before becoming a company in its own right in 2001.
Speech synthesis
Building on the recommendations of the University of Padua, by applying the technique of so-called diphones (the union of a consonant and a vowel, that counts 150 in total for the Italian) the voice technology group led by Giulio Modena created the first speech synthesizer with high intelligibility able to speak (and sing) Italian in 1975. It was called MUSA (MUltichannel Speaking Automaton), which demonstrated what was possible with the technology of the time. The results achieved in those years were condensed into an audio disc at 45 rpm published in 1978, distributed in thousands of copies through the mass communication media. The auto track, after a short spoken self-presentation of the system, contained a funny Italian version of the song Frère Jacques carried out in polyphony (a cappella) with more singing voices (MUSA could manage up to 8 synthesis channels in parallel).
The evolution of this prototype, with the increase in the number of diphones (about 1000), the refinement of the tools of language analysis, and improved waveform management led to a marked improvement of the synthetic voice too. This led to the creation of the first integrated circuit of "voice synthesizer" developed internally in CSELT, which was manufactured by SGS (catalog as Zilog's Z80 microprocessor's peripheral (with the code M8950).
Later in the nineties, "ELOQUENS" was born, a multi-platform software speech synthesizer aimed for various operating systems including DOS, Windows, System 7, Unix, OS/2) and telephone boards with very large numbers of channels, such as those used by the Italian telephone operator to build the reverse telephoner subscribers information service (used to obtain a subscriber's identity and address from their telephone number).
Towards the end of the 1990s speech synthesis took on a new approach, instead of passing diphones it would use the selection and concatenation of acoustic units of variable length, an approach made possible by the increased power of computers and especially the increasing capacity of mass storage systems. This resulted in "ACTOR" – "The human sounding voice" – which began to have a large audience due to the number of telephone services and applications created by Loquendo related companies.
In the year 2000, the synthesizer was released from the research labs as a commercial product, including a number of editing tools to produce synthetic audio enriched with emotions, and it was also released as an SW library for use in various products, from small portable devices such as mobile phones, navigators and palm computers, to multichannel/multilingual telephone servers for (semi)automatic call centers.
The Loquendo speech synthesis has become an internet meme on YouTube, though it is more common in videos of the Spanish language. It is often used in creepypastas and parody dubbings (often with vulgar language).
Speech recognition
Shortly after the start of the research into speech synthesis, they began research on speech recognition and at the beginning of the eighties produced the first prototype, able to recognize the ten digits and a few simple commands.