Loquendo Presents Laila, Its First Female Arabic Voice

Loquendo has launched a new voice, Laila, its first female voice for the Arabic language. The company’s first male Arabic-speaking voice, Tarik, was released in June. 

Laila and Tarik both speak Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), spoken by approximately 208 million people. It is the official language of the news media and universally taught in schools.

With the launch of its Arabic language TTS in June, the company also released a new version of Loquendo TTS Director, its multiplatform tool for creating prompts by means of a listen-and-edit procedure. For anyone working with written Arabic, TTS Director now functions as a fully comprehensive text editor, managing 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 can align the text to the left if required.

Loquendo TTS Director also enables the automatic insertion of Arabic diacritics (representing short vowels and consonant length, they are normally omitted in written Arabic). The user simply inputs the text (without diacritics), and with one mouse click a new window opens displaying the full text with diacritics automatically inserted.

As with all supported languages, Loquendo TTS in Arabic offers a wide range of expressive cues, commonly used Arabic phrases giving an extended emotional range, along with a series of paralinguistic events (coughs, sighs, laughter, etc.) for adding additional color to TTS prompts. Again, as for all languages, pauses are automatically inserted at appropriate points in the prompt to enhance the prosody and intonation of the synthetic speech. 

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 Laila for yourself, or meet the full Loquendo TTS family.