YTD news and announcements of LHSP...
June 26, 2000
Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) announced that Tellme Networks, Inc., a speech portal services company, has licensed L&H RealSpeak text-to-speech technology for use in the Tellme service.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
June 22, 2000
Lernout & Hauspie (L&H), together with KBC Bank & Insurance, a Belgian banking and insurance group, announced that they have reached an agreement in principle to form a joint venture to develop, launch and distribute a voice-enabled portable Internet appliance accompanied by Internet services. KBC Bank & Insurance has announced its intent to invest up to $100 million in the venture. Under the arrangement, L&H plans to become a prime partner by licensing its technology for use in up to three million Internet appliances for distribution to Belgian homes.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
June 12, 2000
Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) announced that Belgacom, a Belgium-based telephony operator, will license L&H's text-to-speech technology L&H Realspeak for use in its reverse directory system called Sherlock.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
June 7, 2000
Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) announced the completion of its acquisition of Dragon Systems, Inc. of Newton, Mass., a privately held leader in speech and language technology. Under the terms of the agreement, L&H acquired all of the outstanding stock of Dragon Systems for approximately 11.7 million shares of L&H Common Stock (including options assumed and adjusted for the 2-for-1 split) or a value of approximately $460 million. L&H will use the purchase accounting method for this acquisition.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
June 1, 2000
Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire certain Rodeer Systems, Inc.'s medical transcription assets, including Rodeer's operations in Arizona, Georgia, Minnesota, Oklahoma and Texas. The agreement calls for L&H to acquire the assets for an aggregate purchase price of approximately $25 million.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
May 30, 2000
Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) announced the shipment of L&H Voice Xpress version 5, the newest offering in its family of speech recognition products. The new version includes improved accuracy and usability and support for e-mail, Internet browsing and chat applications.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
May 9, 2000
Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) announced that it has acquired Interactive Systems Inc. (ISI), a Pittsburgh-based speech and language technology developer, for approximately $8.9 million in cash with a $4 million earn out over 2 years. The assets from this acquisition will provide L&H with additional expertise with which to further natural language understanding (NLU), a technology that figures prominently in data mining, data management, audio mining, clinical language understanding and other processes needed for comprehensive healthcare and telecommunications solutions.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
May 8, 2000
Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) has completed its previously announced acquisition of Dictaphone Corporation of Stratford Conn. L&H will use the purchase method to account for this acquisition.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
May 4, 2000
Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) will license its RealSpeak to BeVocal, Inc., a consumer V-services company, for an undisclosed sum. BeVocal will use its patent-pending VocalBoost Architecture and L&H RealSpeak to make a broad range of personalized Web content and services available from any phone.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
April 26, 2000
Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) and InterVoice-Brite, the call automation company, announced that InterVoice-Brite will integrate L&H RealSpeak and TTS3000 text-to-speech engines into its unified messaging applications and call automation platforms.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
April 13, 2000
Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) and Visteon Corporation announced their intent to create a joint venture dedicated to advancing and accelerating the use of speech in automotive applications. This joint venture will include automotive Internet speech portal services and solutions. L&H will have a 60 % interest in the venture; Visteon will invest $20 million in the venture, giving it a 40% interest.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
April 13, 2000
Kensington International Holding Corp. announced that the Mail Call service offered by their subsidiary, Mail Call, Inc. has begun using the L&H RealSpeak text-to-speech engine from Lernout and Hauspie (L&H). L&H RealSpeak is a new de facto standard in text-to-speech technology that can read aloud text with a human sounding voice, and represents a breakthrough in terms of voice quality and intelligibility.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
April 10, 2000
Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) demonstrated a healthcare clinical documentation system that integrates large vocabulary speech recognition over the telephone, digital dictation, natural language technology and transcription capabilities, all delivered via the Internet using an application service provider (ASP) model. The L&H Internet Charting Service is expected to be an outsourced solution for a wide variety of healthcare organizations, comprised of multiple service offerings.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
April 4, 2000
Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) announced an agreement with Worldmine, a travel web site, under which it will provide translation and localization services for the Singapore-based Company's on-line travel web site content.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
April 4, 2000
STMicroelectronics announced, with Lernout & Hauspie (L&H), the joint development of an integrated solution for hands-free car cellphone kits. Already selected by telecom companies such as Telit, it will be used in end products that will reach consumers this year. Based on ST's Euterpe digital voice processor chip, the new solution includes a 24-bit fixed point digital signal processor core that supports voice processing software from Lernout & Hauspie, Altec Lansing and Keyware Technologies.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
March 28, 2000
Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Dragon Systems Inc. of Newton, Mass., a supplier of speech and language technology. The acquisition will provide L&H with approximately 350 additional employees, 170 of whom are research scientists and development engineers. L&H will acquire all of the outstanding stock of Dragon Systems for approximately 5.45 million shares of L&H Common Stock.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
March 26, 2000
Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) and MedQuist announced that the parties involved have reached an amicable settlement in an action brought against L&H by MedQuist. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed. The parties indicated a willingness to investigate a broader business relationship between L&H and MedQuist.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
March 20, 2000
Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) announced the shipment of its L&H Power Translator Pro version 7, software that produces draft-quality translations of letters, reports, e-mail and Web pages.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
March 13, 2000
Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) announced a licensing agreement with America Online for L&H's Intelligent Content Management tools, including spelling and grammar checking.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
March 7, 2000
Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Dictaphone Corp., a privately held dictation and telephony call center recording systems company. The transaction calls for L&H to acquire all of the outstanding stock of Dictaphone for approximately 4.75 million shares of L&H common stock.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
February 28, 2000
Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) announced two new bundling/promotional agreements with Voyetra Turtle Beach and AMD. Voyetra Turtle Beach, a manufacturer of sound cards, multimedia hardware and software will bundle L&H Voice Xpress Advanced, a continuous speech recognition software product from L&H, with the Montego II sound card. The AMD promotion will include L&H Now You're Talking on the Web as part of a free Online FunPack, available to those who purchase a computer running an AMD Athlon processor and subscribe to Road Runner High Speed Online.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
February 23, 2000
Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) and Cellport Systems announced that they are demonstrating a new hands free system for the automobile which employs voice activated dialing. Cellport developed the system in 6 Months with support from engineers in L&H's Burlington-based Customer Center, which, along with an Ieper Belgium center, opened in October 1999 and was followed in January by a center in Singapore.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
February 22, 2000
Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) announced that it has acquired speech engineering resources from Matra Nortel Communications, a speech processing developer, and all of the assets of Elan Informatique, a France-based text-to-speech (TTS) technology provider. L&H acquired Matra Nortel's speech resources and Elan for a combined initial payment totaling $7 million and $1 million in L&H common stock with an additional $8 million earn-out spread over 2 years based upon performance.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
February 15, 2000
Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) announced that its text-to-speech technology will be made available for use with Lucent Technologies' new Enhanced Media Resource Server (eMRS), a new platform for deploying Internet and calling services. The relationship between Lucent and L&H underscores the growing demand for speech technologies among vendors and developers in the telecommunications industry.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
February 7, 2000
Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) showcased solutions that highlight how it is moving speech and language technologies beyond the desktop to a growing number of handheld, mobile and wireless devices, significantly increasing the ease of use and utility of those devices. L&H demonstrated an industry first: its prototype handheld device that has a large vocabulary continuous speech dictation engine to easily send and receive e-mail, surf the Web and conduct e-commerce transactions.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
January 31, 2000
Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) announced that Hung Chang Co., Ltd., a Seoul-based telecommunications technology company, has signed a multi-year agreement under which it will license L&H's speech technologies in multiple languages to develop speaker verification and reservation applications. Under the agreement Hung Chang will license L&H's ASR 1500 automatic speech recognition engine and its text-to-speech engine in Korean, Japanese, English, German, French and Spanish languages.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
January 23, 2000
Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) announced that the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey has denied a motion filed by MedQuist against L&H and certain of its officers seeking to enjoin L&H's entry into the medical transcription market. The motion was part of an action, filed on January 14, 2000, seeking a preliminary injunction to prohibit L&H from improper use and dissemination of MedQuist's confidential information and to enjoin L&H from entering the medical transcription market.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
January 10, 2000
Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) and Unisys Corporation announced an alliance under which Unisys will resell L&H's speech recognition and text-to-speech technology with its Unisys e-@ction Natural Language Speech Assistant (NLSA) developers tool set. As part of the agreement, L&H will resell the Unisys NLSA software to its customers for use with L&H's own speech technologies. The alliance enables customers to obtain the fully integrated Unisys and L&H software from either company.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
