You know when you ask someone to comment on something you think is important and they just end up starting a whole new conversation. This is what happend when I asked my friend Amit from Israel for his two cents on the SIPphone launching a Gizmo Call which since yesterday evening is just completely not important anymore.

This is because I just fell in love with this service called fringe. Uncomplicated, unattached and a little uh mysterious… I hope this isnt just a crush.
So what, who and where is Fringe?

What: fring™ uses your mobile internet connection to make peer-to-peer VoIP calls, send instant messages and talk with VoIP applications such as Skype and Google Talk, at no extra cost.

Who: Great question in fact, I know he lives in Fringland. There my be a wierd correlation between this and the incredible killer bees story from last week. It’s awfully exciting and mysterious in any case.
Where is Fring now : Fringe is here: http://www.fring.com

There is some important reading on this subject here: http://www.henshall.com/cgi-bin/mt-henshall-tb.cgi/977

For a country where you half the population doesn’t speak a word of anything else than their mother tongue we were slightly surprised to learn that the best quality voice technology actually comes from a company based in Turin. After countless days of listening to wav files of disputably bad, average and good quality I quite literally couldn’t believe my ears when listening to some of these demo files. I haven’t quite heard text to speech of this quality, what is more it incorporates a library of expressions which can be used to naturalize a narrative.

Subjecting a programmer to the configuration is probably not such a good idea as it is still a process of trial and error to get the best sounding narrative but with the easy to use interface it is something most of us could handle.Loquendo is mostly used in IVR and (wait for it) video response systems!

A little excerpt from their last newsletter should inspire you!

This issue’s main article will introduce us to the emerging world of voice and video applications. IVRs are evolving into IVVR (Interactive Voice and Video Response) platforms and this creates new opportunities for VoiceXML and CCXML platforms, such as Loquendo’s VoxNauta platform.

I have been in contact with their charming Sales representative Massimilino Ferrero: or Max for short who works out of their office in Paris. Remember natural voices don’t work without an engine to run them so best do your homework or ask for a copy of mine;-)

http://www.loquendo.com : Sign up for their newsletter! Or contact me for details regarding your request.