Loquendo Reaches 30 Languages with the Launch of Arabic TTS
Loquendo has launched its TTS speech engine in the Arabic language with the male voice of Tarik, Loquendo’s first Arabic-speaking voice. A female Arabic-speaking voice will be released later this year.
Tarik speaks Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), the lingua franca for approximately 208 million Arabic-speaking people, and the formal Arabic language that is written and spoken throughout the contemporary Arab world, where it is the language of the news media, is universally taught in schools, and is one of the United Nations’ official languages.
In tandem with the launch of Arabic, Loquendo releases a new version of TTS Director, its multiplatform tool enabling application developers to create prompts by means of a listen-and-edit procedure. For anyone working with written Arabic, TTS Director now offers a fully comprehensive and highly flexible text editor. Thanks to a bidirectional algorithm, TTS Director seamlessly manages text orientation—right to left for Arabic characters and left to right for numbers, foreign words, and all Loquendo user control tags. Arabic texts can be right-aligned with one mouse click, but for editing purposes non-Arabic speakers may align the text to the left if required.
Loquendo TTS Director also enables the automatic and instantaneous insertion of Arabic diacritics, which represent short vowels and consonant length. The user simply inserts the text (without diacritics), and with one mouse click a new window opens displaying the full text with diacritics automatically inserted. Via the text editor, therefore, users have access to the same invaluable diacritization tool also present in the speech engine.
As with all supported languages, Loquendo TTS in Arabic offers a wide range of expressive cues, commonly used Arabic phrases given an extended emotional range, along with a series of coughs, sighs, laughter, etc. for adding additional color to TTS prompts. As for all languages, pauses are automatically inserted at appropriate points in the prompt to enhance the prosody and intonation of the synthetic speech.
TTS Director now also features a search tool for locating any word or character within a prompt, and a Go-to-Line feature for jumping to any of the automatically numbered lines within a TTS Director window.
With the addition of Arabic, Loquendo TTS is currently available in 30 languages and 71 voices, with more always under development. Loquendo TTS is now available in the following languages: Arabic; U.S., U.K., and Australian English; Russian; Mandarin Chinese; European and Canadian French; American, Castilian, Mexican, Chilean, Argentinian, and Colombian Spanish; European and Brazilian Portuguese; German; Dutch; Polish; Greek; Turkish; Norwegian; Swedish; Danish; Finnish; Catalan; Valencian; Galician; Esperanto; and Italian, in both male and female voices, with more always under development.
Hear Tarik for yourself.