Loquendo Unveils Loquendo TTS Director

Loquendo has released Loquendo TTS 6.4, which includes an application development enhancement: Loquendo TTS Director.

Loquendo TTS Director is a multi-platform Java development tool, which supports users in designing prompts for their applications. Text is written and interactively refined through a "listen and edit" procedure, which allows fine-tuning for even better TTS performance.

Prompt designers can select the TTS voice, which may be changed through control tags in the text itself; they can choose among Multi-line, Paragraph, or SSML Modes; they can set acoustic and prosodic parameters, and save their edited prompts both in text and audio formats. A menu helps them choose the TTS features.

The Control Tags menu provides access to Loquendo's TTS Control Tags, which are grouped according to a set of categories - i.e. voice, language, prosody, pronunciation, spelling and pausing, and audio mixer.

The Effects menu guides users through the software's features, which include "expressive cues" and "plug-in lexicons" to obtain the effect required. They are grouped according to intuitive linguistic categories. The repertoire of Expressive Cues consists of a set of pre-recorded formulas, which include conventional figures of speech, like greetings and exclamations, interjections and paralinguistic events, which suggest expressive intention.

Loquendo technology can be further enhanced using the Plug-in lexicons, which are available to give the engine extra capability for reading specific types of text that may contain idiosyncratic spelling of words, abbreviations, and symbols.