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Technology Stocks : Fonix:Voice Recognition Product (FONX)
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To: Dr. Bob who wrote (1354)11/18/1997 5:06:00 PM
From: Mark Cox  Read Replies (4) of 3347
 
Bob, to muddy the waters further I have the conception of the product as follows. fonix have produced a technology which the Siemens engineers have become excited about incorporating into telecoms products via chips. fonix will be cooperating but the ongoing joint venture will be the brainchild of Siemens from now on, using the fonx proprietary technology in the same manner as you or I use any software application. We just call occasionally for help. This is the advantage of a licencing system for growing high margins and concentrating on other deals. fonix eventually turns into an R&D unit allied to a help desk.

Also you still appear to believe that the product may have something 'inferior' about it, no doubt stemming from the 'Jack and Jill' demo's put on by the company since June. Those demos were a kind of unfortunate trick which separated the 'men' (technically minded visionaries, scientists, experts and I hasten to add I am not in this camp) and the 'boys' (lay curious who judge what they see at face value failing to consider the implications). I have finally understood this and now know that the technology works impressively in speech to text, compression (100:1) and text to speech (no more computer sounding voices).

If Lernout & Hauspie, IBM and Dragon et al could be considered to be like car company's, fonix is like an engine manufacturer with a technology to make a gallon of gas go 100 miles. The so called competition may well one day decide to outsource their engines.

Additionally, the market represented by these speech company's is largely that of text creation. The advent of effective user independant speech recognition opens up all sorts of extra markets which diminish text creations' importance. Imagine an audio help desk FAQ where your own questions were answered by a system which listened to the question carefully and was able automatically to select appropriate answers. This does'nt even get to the VCR which responds to "record Star Trek at 9pm eastern on Channel 9 Sunday" or the toaster which can adjust for darkness verbally. Try thinking about which products might improve if they just listened (or husbands/wives/friends/board contributors for that matter).

I have no doubt we will see a continuation of deals and extraordinary applications using the technology on a small chip which HMM can't match without megabytes and MHZ although it has caught up some.

Wall street is simply waiting for the numbers which we'll certainly obtain when we get the 4th quarterly, by which time other deals may be on the board as well. I think we may have seen the final horizon in this mountain climb but now we've reached 'credibility' the next step is effective product production etc so we'll have to hope this can be managed.

I have really enjoyed this board for its considered opinions and a real attempt to figure things out.

Parx
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