Parx,
I think you're dead wrong when you say:
"I think the LHSPF or Dragon business might be nice one day but its only a small part of the overall business available."
First, you missed my point, which wasn't based on the size of the business, but on the expertise of the folks who are selling voice recognition products. If THEY say fonix has an outstanding technology which could give them an edge, that means way more to me than Oberteuffer, Ashton, or anyone else so far, because they really know voice recognition in BOTH the technical and business sense.
Second, I disagree with you that what they provide is only a small part of the business. I am astounded that fonix has not gotten very far in developing a vocablulary, but that seems to be the case, and even their strategy - to have the vocabulary provided by a software supplier. Without access to a very large vocabulary, they have NOTHING. HMM can provide continuous, user-independent voice recognition for a small vocabulary and is doing so now. Fonix's ONLY potential benefit is to facilitate voice recognition for a larger vocabluary, in more dialects, at a faster rate and with more intuition than HMM. Maybe they can do this with neural networks, but they absolutely cannot do it without a vocabulary. If they don't develop that in-house (and there is no sign that they are doing so), that must rely on a software company to provide it for ANY application. Fonix/Siemens doesn't have a product without a vocabulary.
Now maybe fonix anticipates that their products will use anybody's software, like Intel chips. I 'm sure fonix hopes to get to the point where all the software companies will pay them licensing fees to optimize their performance on a "fonix inside" device. But the risk is that the software companies will all find their own fonix-less solutions and partnerships, like LHSPF/SGS-Thomson, and like IBM could do internally - even using neural networks, which fonix does not have exclusive rights to. When that happens, you can bet fonix will be in court claiming patent infringement, but I don't think you want the value of your investment resting on whether they could win such a suit unless you understand patent law and the wording of this particular patent a lot better than I do.
So linking up with a software voice recognition firm would be valuable to fonix in two respects - it would give considerable credibility to their approach and technology, and it would give them a seamless solution, the whole package, to put on the market.
Bob |
