Intel Investors - Intel expands pact with Lernout & Hauspie on Real Time Speech Recognition - with an Internet Focus.
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Real-Time Speech To Be Demoed In Boston
Lernout & Hauspie Partners With Intel On Speech
Technology Pact To Focus On Real-Time Voice Systems
(URL: crn.com
By Tim Scannell
Leper, Belgium
12:42 PM EST Mon., June 07, 1999
Speech and language technology developer Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products (L&H) plans to launch a joint development partnership with Intel Corp. later this month that will focus on natural language products and systems.
As part of the effort, both companies will concentrate on developing systems with embedded realtime speech-recognition capabilities that will be enabled for use over the Internet. These systems also will make use of telephony technologies to allow users to call into Internet-based systems and corporate Web servers to retrieve information without using a computer.
The technology and related products are scheduled to ship this fall.
Information will be retrieved by voice commands, translated via natural language technologies and then transcribed back to the user, said L&H Chief Executive and President Gaston Bastiaens.
"The technology will allow us to communicate with computers over the telephone with natural language conversational dialogue, communicate with a server, and the server will respond intelligently," he said during an interview from L&H world headquarters in Belgium. "This technology is also very important to the expansion of electronic-commerce business."
L&H plans to demonstrate its realtime Multi-Lingual Chat technology for the first time in public this week at the TechTalks speech conference and exhibition in Boston. A key aspect of the software is its ability to learn a user's voice patterns in five minutes or less and then respond to questions and queries in the user's voice, said Bastiaens. Previously, this learning curve took up to up to a half hour.
L&H signed the joint venture agreement with Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel in early May to develop E-commerce and telephony solutions using the company's speech and language technologies. These include L&H's Natural Language Technology (NLT), intelligent content management (ICM), and machine translation and speech synthesis.
"Combining Intel's leadership in the high-performance, connected computing platforms together with L&H's leading technologies presents exciting possibilities for Web-based products and services," said Ron Whittier, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Content Group. Target devices include stand-alone and client/server PCs, connected smart devices and the wireless telephones.
Under terms of the agreement, 51 percent of the new venture--based in both Santa Clara and the Flanders Valley facility in Ieper, Belgium--will be owned by Intel and 49 percent by L&H. These facilities will be staffed by employees from both companies. L&H also maintains a U.S. headquarters in Burlington, Mass.
In April, Intel also signed a letter of intent to invest $30 million in L&H in the form of non-voting securities and non-interest bearing convertible into L&H common stock.
L&H continues to work with a number of technology partners in developing and marketing its speech products, especially in medical and call-center applications. Since 1996, L&H also has expanded its business beyond technology development into systems integration. The company now has three divisions: Technologies and Solutions, Applications and Consulting, and Services.
Revenue for L&H's first-quarter, ended March 21 was $70.7 million, an increase of 10 percent over reported revenue of $35.1 million for the year-ago quarter.
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