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Technology Stocks : Voice and/or Speech Recognition: The Next Holy Grail -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dr. Bob who wrote (48)	4/11/1998 5:38:00 PM
From: Bill Jackson	Respond to of 90

Bob, Seagate does seem out in left field, true, I suspect that speech rec will soon be a commodity item and the winner will be the one who shrinks it and optimises it for embedded uses. This recent sniffing by the DOJ at Microsoft might just inhibit this type of action. In fact the DOJ should be told now just so they can take action in advance and not wait 'till the Dragon is on death row. I do not know what kind of forward warning system the DOJ uses, if any, but they should be alerted to this type of activity. The OS market now grows at the rate of the market growing, and as the ASP falls the % going to OS rises, typically $80 for Win95. In under $1000 systems this is 8% of total price and can be 50%? of the makers profit margin?. So if they give it away free like IE4, they do not grow their own market, but they do destroy anothers market(Netscape) and for no gain on their part. So Why? Dog in manger? A look to the future when another might make a browser based OS and no-one needs windows anymore? All possible. In the long run you buy and OS and it has all the programs embedded in it. No need for others?, ridiculous, but we will go partway down this path I am sure, since we have already been that way. Bill

To: Dr. Bob who wrote (48)	4/12/1998 1:06:00 PM
From: studdog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90

This thread has surpassed my expectations. I will try to summarize what I have learned so far, FWIW. 1. If you believe speech recognition is going to be big, then you have got to hold LHSPF. At current valuations I can only bring myself to open a small position, but there may be no looking back from here. 2. VCSI looks very attractive. They are growing through acquisition and have strategic alliance with Siemens. They actually have sales, are expected to be profitable this year, and could actually be considered relatively cheap as their price to book is less than 5, market cap is 85 million, and sales are 14 million. ("cheap" in this case of course is relative) 3. FONX- I still like FONX, but primarily as a chance to hit one out of the park. High strike out potential though. They represent a potential paradigm shift in the nature of speech recognition fundamental technology; others are working on neural net technology but aren't public. I am going to reduce my position a little to get into LHSPF and VCSI 4. The bigs-IBM, Microsoft, Siemens are all involved in VR. These certainly don't represent pure plays. It appears to me, though, that Siemens is trying to get into VR in a big way and is interesting because of that. 5. Beneficiaries of VR- INTC for sure, the need for bigtime processing power, as demonstrated in some of the above posts, will help sell power machines in the future so we can get back on the sales equivalent of Moore's Law. 6. Private companies - it would be nice to get in on IPO's of such companies as Nuance and Altec. Well, there you have it. My take on VR so far THanks for all the great posts. Karl