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News Roundup: News and events from L&H and its divisions
“For the first time ever, I am confident enough with
a speech recognition program to dictate this entire
review.” With that quote, Owen Linderholm of
Windows Magazine began his recent review of L&H
VoiceXpress™ Professional 2.0. A few hundred
words later, he called the software, “The best voice
recognition program available.”
The review comes right on the heels of two similar awards at the
industry-leading Comdex trade show in November. At Comdex,
L&H Voice Xpress Professional received the 1998 Most Valuable
Product award from PC Computing magazine and was one of only
ten products from all categories to receive the Breakthrough Award
from the magazine.
PC Computing magazine presents the MVP award annually to the
year's most outstanding business computing products in recognition of
their achievements in “usability, innovation, performance, technology
and value.” The Breakthrough Award recognizes a select group of
innovative products that provide the blueprint for “how we will all
work in the years ahead”.
L&H Voice Xpress Professional is continuous speech dictation soft-ware
designed for business professionals who use Microsoft Office
®
.
“L&H Voice Xpress Professional has been judged best in its class
by our tough panel of editors, uncompro-mising
technology experts,” said PC
Computing editor Wendy Taylor. “It is
the speech recognition product of choice
for business technology buyers because it
gives business professionals a strategic,
competitive advantage in the workplace.”
In his review for Windows,
Linderholm said the software had “a
vastly improved recognition engine, bet-ter
speed, built-in support for more appli-cations,
more vocabulary customization,
the ability to import and export speaker
profiles, playback from handheld voice
recorders into Voice Xpress and the abili-ty
to add macros.”
He ended by saying that “for basic dic-tation
accuracy and wide application
support, L&H Voice Xpress Professional
2.0 is the new champion. It replaces
Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred
Edition 3.0 on the WinList.”
L&H RealSpeak™ is introduced as the new standard in voice synthesis
One of the most common complaints
from users of today's best “talking”
products continues to be “robotic”
sounding synthesized voices produced
by most text-to-speech engines. Those
complaints are soon to be answered
with a new voice synthesis technology
that almost perfectly replicates the
sound and quality of the human voice.
Called RealSpeak, L&H engineers
expect the new technology to establish
a new industry standard in text-to-speech
capability. RealSpeak uses pre-recorded
fragments of real human
speech to convert text into speech.
According to the company, the
L&H RealSpeak engine will be ideal
for industries such as telephony, which
require a very high quality voice and
can support a large footprint engine.
RealSpeak technology can handle the
spoken responses required for dial-in
banking, airline reservations, and
other applications where high quality
speech is critical.
As a result, L&H RealSpeak is
expected to boost usage of text-to-speech
technology for telecommunica-tions
and eventually in the auto and
consumer electronics industries.
L&H expects to release RealSpeak
mid-year. It will initially support
American English with German,
British English, French, Spanish,
Italian, Dutch, Japanese, and Korean
to follow. The engine will have an e-mail
pre-processor for retrieval of e-mail
over the phone that will intelli-gently
process and interpret e-mail,
exclude footers, filter headers, speak
emoticons, and
much more. |
