For over a decade, the name "Loquendo" was synonymous with high-quality computerized voices. If you watched memes, YouTube poops, or automated voice announcements in the early 2000s, you have heard Loquendo. But if you visit the official loquendo.com website today, you will find something very different from what you remember.
The original Loquendo website is dead, but the voice lives on inside Microsoft’s servers. Disclaimer: This article reflects the current state of the loquendo.com domain as of the latest available data. Domain ownership and redirects are subject to change by the parent companies (Microsoft/Nuance). loquendo website
By 2012, the acquisition was finalized. Loquendo was absorbed into Nuance’s massive portfolio. Consequently, the original loquendo.com website began to redirect. Current Status: If you type www.loquendo.com into your browser today, you will likely be redirected to Nuance Communications or, following Microsoft’s acquisition of Nuance in 2022, to Microsoft’s Azure Speech Services . For over a decade, the name "Loquendo" was
For casual users, the website offered a . You could type a sentence, hit "Speak," and download the result. This demo became the engine for millions of YouTube videos, prank calls, and viral internet memes across Latin America, Europe, and the US. The Shift: Acquisition by Nuance (2011) The biggest change to the Loquendo website occurred in 2011. Nuance Communications (the creators of Dragon NaturallySpeaking and the voice behind Apple’s Siri) announced its intention to acquire Loquendo. The original Loquendo website is dead, but the
Unlike robotic voices from the 90s, Loquendo used advanced concatenative synthesis. Their most famous voices—often referred to by fans simply as "Loquendo voice"—were (Spanish), Vittorio (Italian), and Paul (English).
Here is the story of the Loquendo website and where the technology went. Originally, the Loquendo website served as the corporate face of Loquendo S.p.A. , a spin-off from the Telecom Italia (CSI) research group. Founded in 2001, the website marketed their Text-to-Speech (TTS) and speech recognition engines to businesses.
While the website is gone, . Loquendo was the bridge between the "robot voice" of the 80s and the natural AI voices of today. For millions of internet users, clicking "Speak" on that old website was their first introduction to synthetic speech.