The following summarizes BCB's Open House October 21
Who Attended:
More than100 investors, financial advisors, and industry contacts attended BCB's Open House held at their Markham office, which has recently been expanded. Three presentations were run throughout the evening, each followed by a Question & Answer period and informal discussion with management.
Market Share Opportunity:
The 20-minute presentation identified the opportunity BCB now has in the digital voice marketplace where the largest maker of digital recording equipment has lost significant ground since moving from analog to digital. Apart from this large but stagnating competitor, BCB and a handful of small, niche companies share the field.
Third Party Validation:
Representatives from BCB's strategic partners were among the guests – Larry Allard, VP Business Development for Lernout & Hauspie and Don Geerts, Enterprise Sales for Data General. BCB customers included Tony Dambrauskas, Director of the Parliamentary Publications Directorate for the Canadian House of Commons, as well as Abdiel Ortiz, Director of Technology for the Thirteenth Judicial District in Tampa. Microsoft Canada also sent two representatives.
Shifting From Hardware to Software:
BCB has traditionally been a hardware company, chiefly because our compression solution entailed hardware. This year will mark the transition from hardware to software, where we discontinue development of proprietary hardware components and concentrate on developing software which runs on a wide range of industry-standard hardware platforms. This emphasis on software sales is reflected by the recent release of Play-ALL and our new PC DART VoiceFLOW software. This software, due to be released this month, automates the installation process, provides transparent voice compression capabilities and takes advantage of third-party hardware components. The VoiceFLOW release will be followed within 60 days by the release of PC DART CourtFLOW, which addresses the large courtroom market.
Speech Recognition:
In the past, one of our most common questions was how speech recognition, if and when the technology reaches 100% accuracy, will affect us. In other words, if a dictating user could dictate through a medium which automatically produces text, why would the user need BCB? First, the optimization of speech recognition technology to 100% accuracy is still many years away and to be effective in a networked environment, any system will require captured voice files to be matched to specific user profiles and routed to appropriate processing stations. Second, because current speech recognition software requires high voice sample rates, voice files cannot be moved. As a result, professionals who dictate are trapped into doing their own editing and formatting. In a busy, professional environment, such as a hospital, this is unacceptable.
BCB's alliance with Lernout & Hauspie brings BCB's voice capture and workflow software together with L&H's speech recognition technology to create a solution that will be brought to market by next June. Together, BCB and L&H are working on an integration strategy which will allow professional users to dictate as they do now. The BCB system will record two files, one a BCB compressed voice file and a second “fat” voice file which will use a special L&H developed algorithm to optimize the output of Lernout & Hauspie's speech-to-text engine. As the “fat” voice file is run through L&H's speech-to-text engine, a small text file is created and linked through BCB's software to the original compressed voice file. These linked files are then routed through any network to an editor who can correct, edit and format the text file by simultaneously listening to the original dictation while making required changes. Once editing is complete, the linked files can be electronically routed back to the author for verification. This will create a major breakthrough in productivity (a 300% improvement in dictation processing is estimated) and provide a solid foothold for speech recognition technology in professional environments.
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