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Technology Stocks : Fonix:Voice Recognition Product (FONX) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dr. Bob who wrote (1850)	4/15/1998 11:27:00 PM
From: Mark Cox	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3347

Hello, Dr Bob. I am reading your post and it occurs to me that you totally discount the possibility that LHSPF and IBM and others (bar fonix and DSP), are waging conventional warfare while fonix has the bomb. I remember you disputing this point a while back before you were one of the first to depart the MF board. Your prescience in this departure, I'm afraid, will fail you if you plan to stay away from fonix. (No new messages tonight despite a respite in the shareprice!!) I am of the persuasion that NN's are superior enough to HMM, that all currently existing sales of ASR products will certainly be replaced by them within a few years. I believe therefore that there is currently no competitive threat from any other quoted company. In thinking about this it seems to comes down to the level of superiority of the fonx tech and the low likelihood that a competitor has found and protected a similar or equivalent tech. If fonx is for real, then their "survival" through this period is less a matter of management skills than simply getting product out the door, with or without partners. Since they have been eminently successful so far in partnering with eminently capable institutions, I am just waiting for the evidence of such tech to come out. Like you say "unless you have such an outstanding and unique product that everyone has to play ball with you " applies in my opinion to fonix. Remember the Siemens reaction, "The best solution we have seen". Now we have the acquisition of a path straight to sales in TTS with Acuvoice. Your description of the purchase of Acuvoice as a way to diversify into something with which they can compete I think is flawed due to the possibility that the STT end of the fonix tech is going to be extremely competitive for some of the above reasons. The AcuVoice acquisition may have been too good to be passed up since fonx had the solution to this end as well but a less formed plan for its deployment until the Acuvoice idea emerged. Now fonx is equally balanced, with its tech applying equally to STT and TTS. LHSPF's language ability in my opinion, as a linguist, is a limited benefit and one camouflaged by a sense of the difficulty of acquiring linquistic expertise. Causing whatever ASR engine to become multilingual is simply a matter of time and effort. There is no magic to a second or fiftieth language once the first is acheived. LHSPF might have a current advantage and look good now but how long will it take to simply make the fonx tech French or Senegalese enabled, or even latin. I suspect not long. Remember there is a tendency for Anglo's in America to be a little insular and be impressed with multi lingualism. Its harder for us Anglos to cope with multi sexed and declining nouns and multiple verb endings which exist in other languages. IMHO its only a matter of hiring an Arabian speech pathologist and showing him the tech before you have an Arab version of it. This sounds simplistic but an NN techie could guide the speech people as to how to train the NN for particular linguistic nuances of a particular language. Remember that MSFT had a Serbo-Croatian version of Windows out there year's before LHSPF arrived. Anyway, all this is supposition but seem to me to be realistic. Parx