The Citizens of Barcelona and Turin Select Loquendo Technology to Power Services

The Municipality of Barcelona's "Large Object Collection" service and the Municipality of Turin's "Cultural Agenda" information service, developed in the context of the EU-funded HOPS IST project, are leveraging Loquendo's speech technology and natural language dialogue. The project's principal objective is that of enabling a natural language-based Hub for the deployment of Online Public Services.

The first prototypes of these exciting new-generation services were deployed in July 2005 in Castillan Spanish, Catalan, Italian and UK English. Residents of Barcelona (Spain), requiring the local municipal services to collect large and heavy refuse items from their homes, obtain the service by interacting over the phone with the automated call center by voice. Meanwhile, those interested in the multiple cultural highlights of Turin (Italy), interact with their local automated call center for information on the city's cultural events, including concerts and art exhibitions, using their voice.

These services will use Loquendo's patented Spoken Dialogue System (Loquendo SDS), a natural-language based mixed initiative dialogue technology in conjunction with Turin's 2006 Winter Olympics.

The HOPS project services are automated and powered by Loquendo's speech recognition and synthetic speech engines Loquendo TTS and Loquendo ASR, integrated within the Loquendo VoxNauta platform.