To: Flora Wood who wrote (384 ) 3/31/1999 1:34:00 AM From: Hart Read Replies (1) | Respond to
Hi Flora..The company expects to file the 20F during the first week of April. Once we've filed, the SEC has a rough 60-day window to approve the application and/ or request additional information. One measure of a company's productivity and commitment is its R & D spending as a percentage of revenues. In the technology sector, commitments of 15 - 20% are common with solid growth companies. BCB's R & D spending has been 92% of sales in 1996, 86% in 1997 and 70% in 1998. Bob Armstrong, Executive Vice President: Bell Canada has embedded a speech recognition engine in their Directory Assistance service that works by taking samples of individual voices and comparing their data points to a benchmark. The success of the engine depends on amassing huge volumes of samples so that the engine has exposure to all the different accents, inflections and pitches and can recognize words. Because of the volume of calls that go through directory assistance, Bell has a sample base of over 50 million inputs, enabling it to become fairly proficient at the words that are most commonly used Comparing that to BCB and Lernout & Hauspie, our speech recognition partner, it's fair to say that Bell works well because of the size of the sample base. Most speech recognition applications wouldn't have that kind of volume and as a result, the technology is not yet up to par for the majority of professional applications in the legal and medical marketplace, marketplaces where BCB provides a very valuable service.
