Loquendo Releases VoxNauta 7.1.0
Loquendo today released Loquendo VoxNauta 7.1.0—the latest version of its VoiceXML/CCXML platform.
Loquendo VoxNauta is a fully scalable voice platform for developing multilingual, multivoice interactive voice response (IVR) systems and speech-enabled applications that follow the VoiceXML 2.0 and 2.1 and CCXML 1.0 Web-based architectures.
The release of 7.1 comes only a few months after Loquendo released VoxNauta 7.0.25.
According to Paolo Coppo, vice president of marketing and business development at Loquendo, VoxNauta 7.1 is the platform onto which future offerings will be added, while 7.0.25 will remain the more commercial platform.
“We’re not closing down 7.0,” Coppo says. “It’s that there are some evolutions which have been driven by the standards that make 7.0 and 7.1 in some ways incompatible, so we needed to internally do a software evolution so that now 7.1 will be the [foundation] on which all new releases will be built.”
VoxNauta enables users to create voice services by integrating speech recognition and speech synthesis software. Service developers can manage user input as well as combine synthetic speech, prerecorded messages, music, and special effects to create rich interactions.
The platform offers a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) interface based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)/Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP), allowing simple integration with any IP network. Also, VoxNauta can interface with a public switched telephone network (PSTN)/ISDN telephone network or with a private branch exchange (PBX) through any standard media gateway.
Coppo says that 7.1—which he notes can also become a full media resource function in the context of IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) architecture—will allow Loquendo’s customers to “exploit at the VoiceXML service level all the service-specific, vendor-specific features of our technology—text-to-speech (TTS) and automatic speech recognition (ASR)”
VoxNauta 7.1 offers a new CCXML interpreter that conforms to the World Wide Web Consortium’s Last Call Working Draft of CCXML 1.0. Additionally, users can now employ all the unique features of Loquendo’s ASR and TTS series 7.
The VoxNauta platform can be shipped standalone or with Loquendo’s ASR and/or TTS. The modular architecture of the company’s speech technologies means the VoxNauta platform is independent of both ASR and TTS packages, enabling seamless upgrades to future releases and new voices and languages.
“Our strategy is to be one-stop shopping in some sense to our customers. To be able to give anything from the basic technology to…the full platform,” Coppo says. “We are witnessing more and more evolution toward VoIP and toward changing from the traditional paradigm of telephone network to a more Web-orientated architecture. And so we need to evolve as well to make ourselves ready to give always the latest, state-of-the-art products to our customers.”