Loquendo, a global provider of speech technologies, this week introduced Steven, the new American English voice.

With Steven, Loquendo now has five U.S. English voices. As with all Loquendo voices, Steven is available for telephony, multimedia, and embedded applications,and comes with a number of other features, including:

• Voice Creator, which enables you to take any Loquendo voice and to modify the speaking rate, pitch, and timbre to create and save your own personalized voices – all with just a few clicks of the mouse.
• The User-Driven Unit Selection Tool, which carries out one or more alternative acoustic-unit selections from the speech database if the reading of a prompt is not exactly as you intended it to be.
• Reading Styles, which can be activated/deactivated, adjusting a range of TTS parameters with just one mouse click, greatly simplifying the creation of long and complex prompts. Reading Styles are predefined or user-defined, and many parameters can be altered simultaneously, such as insertion of pauses; reading numbers as dates/time/phone numbers; spelling out acronyms/selected words; reading SMS abbreviations according to the SMS lexicon, and many more.
• The Voice Flavour, a feature that lets you listen back to your prompts exactly as your customers will hear them. Audio compression, frequency range, and sampling rate will be the same as on the device for which your prompt is being designed.

Loquendo TTS is currently available in U.S. and U.K. English, American Spanish, Mexican, Chilean and Argentinian Spanish, Castilian, Catalan, Valencian, Galician, Brazilian, Portuguese, Italian, Esperanto, German, French, Dutch, Greek, Mandarin Chinese, Swedish, Turkish, Canadian French, and Polish in both male and female voices, with more under development all the time.