Last week, global speech technology provider Loquendo announced the interoperability of its Media Resource Control Protocol (MRCP) Server with Avaya's Voice Portal 5.0. The two speech technology vendors have a long history of integrations and partnerships. This recent cooperation will enable customers of business communications solutions provider Avaya to tap into Loquendo's suite of speech solutions within Avaya's flagship speech self-service solution for contact centers.

"Loquendo ASR and TTS have been available for interoperability with former versions of Avaya products since several years," says Paolo Coppo, vice president of marketing and business development at Loquendo. "With the release of the new version of [Avaya Voice Portal], it was very natural to include it in the portfolio of Loquendo-certified products."  

Incorporated within the Loquendo MRCP Server is Loquendo's speech recognition solution, ASR 7.8, as well as the vendor's text-to-speech engine, Loquendo TTS 7.8. Because Loquendo products are fully committed to supporting open standards, Coppo says that it was rather simple to complete the interoperability tests. The Loquendo MRCP Server is geared toward large-scale telephony deployments in environments such as call centers, CRM systems, and self-service applications.

Loquendo and Avaya announced an expansion of their cooperation in August last year. Since then, they have increased the number of deployments, Coppo says, refraining from revealing the exact number. "Avaya is probably the strongest player in this field today," Coppo says. "Its worldwide reach is definitely important to exploit our multilingual portfolio of about 30 languages and 70 voices." Loquendo solutions were previously integrated with solutions from Cisco Systems, Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, and Interactive Intelligence. Coppo hints that there's a possibility of more integrations to come.

"We are implementing our strategy of becoming a reference player in this market," Coppo says. Loquendo MRCP Server 7.1 and Speech Suite 7.0 are available for the following operating systems:

• Windows XP Professional, Windows Server 2003 & 2008;  
• Red Hat Linux Enterprise Edition 3, 4 and 5; 
• Linux CentOS 5; and
• SuSE 10 SP2.