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Strategies & Market Trends : Buffettology -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: James Clarke who wrote (2187)	2/23/2000 9:14:00 PM
From: jhg_in_kc	Respond to of 4691

James, take off the green eyeshades and look at the possibilites in LHSP. I can hear you saying, we don't invest in possiblities but I would reply that this is the leader in this high tech niche. Let your imagination work as you read this article. I think I have found a potentially fine investment. Think: talking English (or American, in the case of twister) into a computer in your car without taking your eyes off the road to buy a product in French in France. Think: your voice goes out to--vast server farms populated by millions of intelligent robots who hear your commands and begin their work like untiring ants!! The stock is worth a small investment on that phrase alone. (no Buffett stock yet, to be sure, but you guys need some fresh air, if you ask me.) all the best jhg p.s. sold some more RMBS today, probably a mistake. The Voice of "Ambient Intelligence" Lernout & Hauspie's Jo Lernout discusses voice technology Jo Lernout is the co-founder of voice recognition specialist Lernout & Hauspie, whose investors include Microsoft and Intel. Q. What role will voice play in the increasingly mobile world of e-commerce? A. Consumers want easy use of all the devices that now connect to the Internet: PCs, PDAs, WAPphones and in-car systems. All these devices require an intuitive user interface without having to use keypad. Q. And will that interface be primarily English-speaking? A. In any given country, apart from those countries that English-speaking, only 5% of the population will speak English. Be assured that a person in France will not ride around in his car speaking English. Content will have to be delivered in French, Spanish and all the other languages. Q. Can you explain the importance of such a multi-lingual interface? A. People want an intuitive user interface. The system needs to understand what you want--a simple dialogue between you and machine. Thanks to machine translation you get content in your own language. You can ask it questions in one language and you receive a reply in your own language even if the content was originally in another language. We combine all machine translation with natural language understanding to supply what we call 'intelligent assistance'. You can have this in every device. We call it the "magic pill"--you have a question you put via whatever medium, your phone, your car, or whatever. We also call it "ambient intelligence". The definition of ambient is that the intelligence is everywhere, you don't have to re-learn for another interface on your PC or your car. Q. WAPphones are being billed at CeBIT2000 as the big thing for e-commerce. What role has voice to play in this trend? A. The handheld device will soon contain direct speech recognition. Some of our customers such as Microsoft have ported out speech recognition. For example, WinCE is now running our speech recognition in some devices now being produced by OEMs. These are Japanese companies which are using WinCE as their platform, but I do not think that I am at liberty to reveal any names at the moment. Speech recognition on WinCE is only for local commands on the device. Once you are connected via WAP then you are on the Net. There you have much larger capabilities. These include full-blown speech recognition, machine translation and the data mining robots that find the information for you. Q. Do you see a time when there will be Web sites which use voice as the interface and which are aimed at mobile phone users? If so, when will this happen? A. Some limited functionality sites already have this. The smart agents on the Net that will handle your information for you are under development. We are building such robots with Intel through a joint-venture located at the Flanders Language Valley campus in Belgium. The joint-venture is 51% Intel and 49% Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products. You might recall that Intel is setting up server farms all over the world. They link them together and one of the first will be in London. These server farms will be populated with smart robots. These robots will be developed by the joint-venture. They are shopping robots and will help consumers to shop all over the Net. You will be able to, for instance, say 'I want to buy this book' and the robots will go out and find it. Q. Is Intel porting L & H speech software onto their new chipsets? A. That is another evolution but I cannot comment further other than to say it is for handsets and PCs and will be on the higher end chipsets. Q. What about simultaneous translation via a mobile phone? When will we be able to pick up a mobile phone and speak into it in any language--a vital consideration for anyone wanting to address a global marketplace via mobile e-commerce? A. It is absolutely right that, for shopping, you will want it in your own language, even if the original information is in another language. That is available today via a PC. Also via a mobile phone talking to the kind of smart shopping robot that our joint-venture with Intel, which is building are multi-lingual by definition. But if I want to talk to someone who is speaking Chinese, then that technology is, in principle, available today. But it is a bit slow. We have speech recognition in English and then translation. Q. When will companies need to incorporate things like mobile voice-activated e-commerce into their business strategies? A. Smart shopping robots will be onstream in less than a year. The simultaneous translation telephone is available today but is too slow for practical use. For using a mobile phone to talk to a Web site with voice as the interface, I would say less than a year.