In these times in which so many applications and platforms receive names in English or derived from it, ‘Loquendo’ is, on the contrary, a word derived directly from the Latin: it is the gerundive (future participle) of the verb ‘loquor’ (to speak), and can be translated as ‘what will be spoken’ or ‘what is speakable’. But don’t worry, the beginning of this story does not go back to Julius Caesar and Cicero, but only to the mid-70s. Although, yes, it is also located in Italy.
It was then that the CSELT (Centro Studi e Laboratori Telecomunicazioni), a research institution in Turin attached to the Institute for Industrial Reconstrution of Italy, created the first highly intelligible speech synthesizer capable of speaking (and singing) Italiancalled MUSE (MUltichannel Speaking Automaton), which used diphones (vowel and consonant combinations) pre-recorded to synthesize voices. The first practical application of it was to create the voices for the musical album ‘La voce del calcolatore’ (computer voice), released in 1978. And if you’re wondering… yes, we’ve come a long way since then:
That technology, however, became the basis for much more refined applications released during the 1990s, also by the CSELT, as ‘ELOQUENS’ or ‘ACTOR’. Finally, in 2001, Telecom Italia (successor to CSELT) created crazy as a commercial company intended to exploit all this speech synthesis technology. At that time, the new company was developing multiple tools for both home users and large call center servers.
The loquenders arrive
It would still be five years before, on May 22, 2006a user called ‘fingazzz’ (a Valencian named Mateo, who proclaims himself on Twitter “Father of loquenderos until proven otherwise”) uploaded to an almost newly created YouTube the first ‘loquender’ video in history, which immediately became a viral hit and started the fever for this kind of content. We are talking, of course, about ‘Still Dorito’:
A few months later, another Spanish user (MrCoucou) started a fashion that would eventually generate thousands of videos on YouTube, the video reviews with Loquendo. The funniest thing is that many users still took a while to find out where that characteristic voice that seemed to be present on multiple YouTube channels came from… even when youtubers began to add the word ‘Loquendo’ to the title or description of their videos , many comments implied that they thought he was a voice actor.
When it became clear what Loquendo was and what it allowed to be done, this phenomenon of videos with Loquendo, initially 100% Spanish, expanded with great success to Latin Americawhere it became fashionable to use this voice synthesis software to publish criticisms (when not mere successions of insults) against all kinds of groups (otakus, reggaeton, emos…).
The English Wikipedia itself stands out, despite the existence of successful English-speaking ‘loquenders’ such as loquendointeractivethat “Loquendo’s voice synthesis has become an Internet meme on YouTube, although it is more common in Spanish language videos“.
The most viewed videos in the history of YouTube that mention ‘Loquendo’
After that first wave of ‘loquenders’, another wave would arrive in 2009 focused on the publication parodic dubbing of gameplays, preferably from the game ‘Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas’), as well as anime reviews. Around this time, most of these dubbings were created using the free application TextAloud, which made it possible to synthesize speech from text.
Today it is possible to use a few seconds of recording of any voice and have an AI synthesize it
The ‘cracked’ packs of TextAloud and Loquendo voices were all the rage for a while…
Global interest in Loquendo peaked between the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012., more or less at the time when Telecom Italia decided all its shares in Loquendo to Nuance, a company specializing in OCR and speech recognition systems that, a decade later, would end up being acquired by Microsoft. Nuance would close its doors in 2022, so Loquendo’s speech synthesis tools are now part of Microsoft’s portfolio of Technologys, just like other tech legends like Windows and Clippy.
Worldwide searches for Loquendo since 2004.