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To: Stu R who wrote (71872)	5/14/2000 11:08:00 PM
From: engineer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 152472

Lernout & Hauspie to make mobile phones talk back By Gilles Castonguay IEPER, Belgium, May 14 (Reuters) - Belgian speech technology company Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products NV (NasdaqNM:LHSP - news) hopes to gain from the growing popularity of mobile phones by making them talk back to their users after surfing the Internet. It plans to launch by Christmas a system that lets people tell their mobile phones and other handheld wireless devices to fetch information on the Web such as traffic reports and movie listings and read it back to them. The system, known as ``Nak'' in its prototype form, will also let them do more complicated online operations such as buying a book or selling a stock. The Nak, short for ``nakulo'' or ``echo'' in Hawaiian, uses a StrongARM computer chip made by Intel Corp. (NasdaqNM:INTC - news) and runs on most operating systems, including Linux and Microsoft Corp.'s (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news) Windows. Lernout Chief Executive Gaston Bastiaens said the system was not only the company's first product for wireless devices, but also its biggest effort to date to break into the elusive retail market. ``This is going to bring speech technology into the mainstream,'' he said at a recent company event at its offices in the western Belgian town of Ieper. Jo Hauspie, the company's co-founder, said it was also Lernout's answer to the difficulty in using tiny gadgets. ``There's a joke that devices are going to get so small that you will need a magnifying glass to read the screen and a toothpick to type something on the keyboard,'' he said. ``The answer is obviously voice recognition.'' Bastiaens said he expected to sign by July or August deals with manufacturers to get the Nak installed in their next line of phones and other devices. ``We're talking to people who make phones, PDA's (personal digital assistants), games, and personal computers,'' he said. Bastiaens said Lernout planned to make extra money from the Nak by using it to sell other services, as well as promoting the system in niche markets such as health services, where nurses who make house calls often need to check a patient's medical records stored in a hopsital's computer data base. ``We believe the biggest opportunities lie in the exploitation of services,'' he said. Bastiaens said the Nak would start contributing to company sales by early next year when Lernout would widen its rollout of the system, but he would not provide specific figures. He said Lernout took about 18 months to develop the Nak, but he declined to say how much it had spent on it. Lernout allocates about 15 percent of total sales to research and development every year. Lernout, whose software and other technology let people use their voice to give computers commands and enable computers to read text back to them, had sales of $110.69 million in the first quarter. Along with other developers of this kind of software such as IBM Corp. (NYSE:IBM - news), Lernout has had difficulty selling its products outside medical, legal, and other specialised markets. William DeStefanis, senior director, product management, said part of the problem was that its products had yet to work as fast or interpret spoken words as correctly as many would expect. ``People have been spoiled by science-fiction movies,'' he told Reuters.

To: Stu R who wrote (71872)	5/14/2000 11:34:00 PM
From: samim anbarcioglu	Respond to of 152472

Stu, I did not mention VOXX did I? I think they have a unique opportunity in being selected as a major vendor by verizon. What an enviable introduction. The rest is up to them. They have a wide product line. And that may stretch them thin. (But coming to think of it, they don't have as many varied products as NOK and they seem to do fine). More importantly, their Return on assets, return on equity and profit margins don't look great. Like Alcatel, tho miniscule in comparison, they try to be a lot of different things. But they certainly seem to be underpriced right now, given the opportunity that awaits them. regards s.a.