Loquendo, global speech technology provider, announces its participation in the "Gadget Show" Challenge, to create a cloned voice and robot of one of the real life presenters of the U.K.’s Gadget Show, Jason Bradbury. Loquendo created an artificial version of Jason’s voice by morphing the voice of Simon – one of Loquendo’s British English synthetic voices.

The Gadget Show Challenge was to allow two of the presenters to host the programme using robot and avatar versions of themselves. As part of this challenge, many experts and organizations collaborated to create a robotic version of Jason, known as J-Bot, with the synthetic speech technology of Loquendo.

To transform the source voice into the target one, a comparison was made of the two voices using recordings of the real voice of Jason and the synthetic voice of Simon. Features such as fundamental frequency and formant positions were analysed. The pitch of Simon’s voice was adjusted to bring it closer to Jason’s, and the positions of frequency resonances were tuned. Digital filtering was also performed to even out spectral energy distribution. The result was a synthetic voice similar in character to the presenter’s natural voice.

"We're very pleased about this collaboration with North One Television's "The Gadget Show," which presents the latest technological innovations in a popular fast-paced format and which has given us the chance to take on the challenge of cloning Jason's voice using our latest technological developments," said Paolo Coppo, VP Marketing and Business Development at Loquendo. "The robotics and artificial intelligence sectors are undergoing rapid expansion, which makes it possible to create increasingly humanoid robots, able to communicate in a way which is both credible and pleasing for the end user. Speech technologies in general, and synthetic speech in particular, are key to creating the illusion that we are able to generate a true robotic clone of a human being."

The episode of "The Gadget Show" featuring J-Bot was broadcast on Channel 5 earlier this month, but there’s still a chance to see the robot in action at the Gadget Show Live at the NEC in Birmingham, 13-17 April 2011.

About Loquendo

Awarded Speech Industry ‘Market Leader’ for the past four consecutive years, Loquendo provides a complete range of speech technologies for server, embedded and desktop solutions – in 31 languages with 75 voices, and constantly growing - helping businesses deliver a next-generation client experience while saving them millions each year.

Loquendo Embedded Technologies are innovative, easy-to-integrate solutions deployed in more than 20 million mobile and on-board navigation systems globally, as well as powering PDAs, assistive devices, robots, virtual Web-assistants and other embedded solutions around the world. Loquendo TTS and Loquendo ASR are high-quality, high-performance technologies, also available on the Loquendo MRCP Server and VoiceXML, CCXML & SCXML platform.

Loquendo is a Telecom Italia company headquartered in Turin, Italy, with offices in the U.S., U.K., Spain, Germany and France, and a global network of partners. For more info, and to hear Loquendo TTS for yourself, go to www.loquendo.com.