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News Roundup: News and events from L&H and its divisions
World's first dictation software
is now available for Cantonese
With more than a billion native speakers, Chinese is far
and away the most widely spoken language in the world.
Now, L&H has unveiled the first PC-based Cantonese con-tinuous
speech recognition product. Making its worldwide
debut in Hong Kong, the unique product is called SP2.
Users simply dictate in a continuous natural voice to
enter Chinese text in tradtional Chinese characters. The
integrated system enables users to switch to handwriting
recognition using a graphics tablet.
L&H also expects to introduce two Mandarin language
versions by Spring. One will be for Beijing accent Mandarin
in simplified Chinese and the other one is for Taiwanese
accent Mandarin in traditional Chinese.
SP2 was originally developed by Louis Woo and Yen-Lu
Chow, co-founders of Asiaworks Ltd. Asiaworks' an L&H
strategic partner.
“The key challenge lies in the difficulty of Asian language
input on keyboard-based PCs,” said Yen-Lu Chow.
“To ensure accuracy, all speech samples were collected in
Hong Kong to get a good representation of different accents
in the local dialect,” said Louis Woo, president of L&H Asia.
“Not only does the system have words commonly used in
Hong Kong, it also includes a rich dictionary of phrases,
including Hong Kong slang, names of districts, streets, com-panies
and celebrities.”
Voice-driven tablet computer is aimed
at healthcare mentoring
Hand-held tablet computers are just
around the turn of the century and
one of the first applications is bound
to be in the medical field. Intelliworxx,
a Florida company, has signed an
agreement to incorporate L&H speech
technology for use with its new
VoiceTablet™ tablet computer.
The first voice-driven application
will be the Intelliworxx internet
browser-based mentoring application
called iM3™. As a partner, L&H will
also help bring the Intelliworxx
VoiceTablet™ — the only Pentium™ II
tablet computer designed for voice —
to its healthcare customer base.
Intelliworxx Interactive Multi-Media
Mentoring™ (iM3™), which is built
around Microsoft Internet Explorer,
allows users to create browser-based
mentoring programs for education,
medical diagnosis and virtually any
other field from medicine to auto repair.
“Our agreement with Intelliworxx is
a natural fit,” said Chris Force, vice
president of the L&H Health Care
Solutions Group. “By combining their
cutting edge mobile applications and
electronics with our speech recognition
technology, we can offer healthcare
solutions that improve patient care,
streamline information gathering, and
lower costs.”
Quincy Hospital first to
test Clinical Voice Station
Everything a doctor, nurse, or other
medical professional does is recorded,
filed, and used in a variety of medical
reports. Virtually all of it is dictated,
then transcribed, typed, edited,
retyped, reviewed and recorded.
Now, at Quincy Hospital in Quincy,
Mass., doctors in the Emergency
Medicine Department will be doing
something different. Physicians create
reports using standard transcription ser-vice
or voice recognition, all from a sin-gle
workstation. The hospital is the first
to test a new solution developed jointly
by L&H and MedQuist, the U.S. leader
in medical transcription services with
more than 6,000 transcriptionists.
Quincy Hospital will begin trial test-ing
the Clinical Voice Station immedi-ately
in its Emergency Department,
which serves about 30,000 patients a
year. The hospital is one of the first in
the region to use speech recognition
department-wide. |
