Loquendo TTS Powers H-care’s Human Digital Assistant Pay-As-You-Go Service

For Immediate Press Release

Turin, 26st February 2008

Loquendo, global speech technology provider, and H-care, leader in developing user-friendly platforms for multi-channel self-service and customer care, today announced the launch of Face Producer on demand.

[HTML1] H-care’s Human Digital Assistants are software based, human-like avatars that can speak, understand and respond in real-time – with lifelike facial expressions and head movements, synchronised perfectly with Loquendo’s award-winning, high quality text to speech.

Following the huge success of the Web Enterprise platform, the Face Producer has been designed as a pay-as-you-go service ideal for projects and budgets of all sizes. Clients can select from a gallery of preconfigured assistant’s, selecting one of Loquendo’s human-like and expressive voices, and using a simple authoring environment, they can start to build human-like conversational videos to appear on their digital channels.

The final video files can be created in a wide range of video formats such as Flash Video or 3gp, to enable usage on websites, kiosks and mobile handsets.

Video content generated with H-care’s Face Producer makes it possible for anyone to create an online assistant – that can be used in a wide variety of applications: website tours, product information, installation guides, how to pay bills online, how to make VoIP calls, answering FAQs, eLearning tutorials, MMS marketing, among others. Finding your way around any website, system, application or device becomes easier, faster and more enjoyable with the help of an expressive, human-like assistant.

“H-care’s ground breaking virtual assistants are now available on demand, enabling even more users to see for themselves the cost saving potential of the Human Digital Assistant,” says Alessandro Martino, Loquendo’s Vice President of Sales for Italy. “It has been clearly demonstrated that customers love using such assistants, and this technology is now accessible for projects requiring a quick time to market, without investment constraints.”

“We are seeing wider interest in the use of Human Digital Assistants on a global basis and our Enterprise platform has seen positive traction in some of the largest Enterprises,” says Umberto Basso, CEO H-care. “The Face producer allows companies to adopt our solution more quickly and easily, as we’ve seen that not all implementations require deep integration with legacy systems.”

To try out the Face Producer, please contact: info@h-care.it.

About H-care – Human Digital Assistant

H-care is a leading developer of user-friendly platforms for multimodal, multi-channel, self-service and customer care. Our Human Digital Assistant^TM platform solves the challenge of making online customer interaction and self-service a human-like customer experience. We combine high quality real-time animation, 3D rendering, state-of-the-art voice synthesis, and integrate seamlessly with existing corporate information sources, to deploy human-like assistance on web portals, mobile phones, ip-set top boxes, and kiosks .

H-care is one of initiatives in H-Farm, Italy’s leading research and innovation center in technology and design, founded by a team that pioneered developing and marketing Internet based technology solutions.

H-care is a company within the Comdata Group.

For more information, visit www.h-care.it.

About Loquendo – Vocal Technology and Services

With over 30 years experience in speech technology, Loquendo is at the forefront of the global speech market. Loquendo TTS, Loquendo ASR, Loquendo Speaker Verification and Loquendo VoxNauta are high-quality, high-performance technologies that guarantee systems integrators the best solutions in 23 languages with 54 voices.

Loquendo is the only speech technology vendor that provides a complete product line for navigation and handheld devices, desktop PCs and telephony servers, guaranteeing the same portfolio of languages and the same core engine in all these environments.

Many enterprises and carriers worldwide have recognized the Loquendo difference, advanced technologies that power millions of calls every day in telecommunications and enterprise markets across the globe.

Loquendo is a Telecom Italia company headquartered in Turin, Italy, with offices in the US, Spain, Germany and France, and a worldwide network of partners.

For more information about Loquendo, and to hear demos of all the Loquendo voices, go to www.loquendo.com.