Loquendo Brings Its Voice Technologies to the Asterisk Community

Digium and Loquendo have entered into a technology partnership that integrates Loquendo’s voice technologies, including its speech recognition and text-to-speech engines and the VoxNauta voice platform for developing multilingual interactive voice response systems, with the Asterisk telephony platform.

The partnership gives the Asterisk development community, a collective of open-source telephony application developers, access to Loquendo’s voice technologies in 26 languages and 63 voices.

“Loquendo’s number of languages and voices is by far the broadest [of any speech company],” says Bill Miller, vice president of product management at Digium. “This provides a tremendous opportunity for Digium. It gives us more of an international appeal.”

The partnership between Loquendo and Digium comes at a time of increased use of Asterisk outside of the United States, according to Miller, who notes that  international accounts make up about half of Digium’s total user base. “We sell quite a bit of Asterisk products through Telecom Italia, and do a lot of business in Italy.”

“The Asterisk community has always been strong worldwide, and the amount of growth going on in businesses of all sizes is huge,” Miller says. “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.”

Used together, Loquendo, VoxNauta, and open source Asterisk can form the basis for custom solutions for both small and large-scale telephony deployments of speech technologies, including auto attendants, customer relationship management (CRM) applications, unified messaging, and self-service applications.

For Loquendo, the partnership exposes its VoxNauta platform to a whole new set of markets as well. “There’s a huge opportunity for Loquendo to grow by being a part of our [Asterisk] ecosystem,” Miller says.

Daniele Sereno, Loquendo’s vice president for product engineering, says the partnership lets the open-source Asterisk developer community focus on creating applications rather than on systems integration, thereby “enriching their Asterisk experience.”