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To: GC who wrote (527)	4/24/1999 12:35:00 PM
From: GC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 767

the magazine page 2 It seems hard to believe, but just five years ago, most people had never even heard of the internet. Today, it's everywhere. E-mail has surpassed regular mail in volume and the number of web pages is nearing 400 million. In 1998, the online world crossed another important mile-stone. For the first time, the number of users living outside the U.S. was more than the number in the U.S. The world has certainly embraced the internet. Over the next decade, new users will become a far more worldly and multilingual lot. Already, more than 150 countries have direct access to the internet, and according to industry statistics, the growth of users around the globe will more than double over the next few years to nearly 150 million in 2002. Even more compelling, most of that growth will come from outside the U.S. Users in Asia and the Pacific Rim including Japan, Taiwan, Australia, Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong will have far greater access in the next few years. In Europe, Scandinavia has already taken the lead for internet growth. In Finland, for instance, there are 62 internet host comput-ers for each 1,000 people, roughly twice the proportion in the United States. Most internet content is in English With all this growth in internet access, one problem will loom larger — language. Today, more than 80 percent of the information on the Internet is in English, a challenge for all the new non-English-speaking users. As the Web becomes more and more a forum for the global village, it promises to become more of an electronic tower of Babel as more and more content goes online in more and more languages. Already, email, which has become the lifeline for the business world, is helpless in overcoming our basic problems of not understanding each other's languages. Helpless that is, until the arrival of the newest generation of machine translation software. These new programs can con-vert incoming and outgoing email, chat room, and newsgroup messages on-the-fly; they can instantly translate the content of any Web page, or they can perform multilingual searches for information regardless what language the data is in. Machine translation technology is here What machine translation does is automatically convert the meaning of words from one language to another. Traditionally, translation has been done by human linguists and the process has always been thought of as very dependent on the skills and sensibilities of the translator. A first-year Spanish student could accurately translate a simple sentence but will have trouble capturing the nuances of more complex language such 2

To: GC who wrote (527)	4/24/1999 12:38:00 PM
From: GC	Respond to of 767

page 3 as literature or business correspondence. For that level of translation, expert linguists will never be replaced. Driving the need for easy-to-use machine translation is the increasing amount of material that requires translating. The sheer volume makes it impractical to rely solely on human translators. “Machine translation is perfectly suited for the internet,” says Marc Bautil, who directs sales and marketing for the L&H internet translation business. “It can provide anyone with 70 to 80 percent translation accuracy with the push of a button. And it can do that in just a few seconds. Most internet users are quite satisfied with that sort of a fast infor-mal translation for email messages and reading Web pages.” New tools for online translation Bringing fast, easy, and inexpensive translation to the Internet is the goal of the L&H iTranslator™series of prod-ucts announced recently by L&H. The L&H iTranslator Solution offers quick automatic translations to and from a half dozen language pairs: English, German, Spanish, French, Arabic, Japanese and Korean, with additional language pairs being developed for Chinese, Russian, Portuguese, Dutch, Scandinavian, and Italian. The L&H iTranslator series currently has two major ver-sions: L&H iTranslator Net, which lets you translate Web documents on the fly; and L&H iTranslator Publish, which allows a Web site to be quickly and easily published in dif-ferent languages. L&H iTranslator Net L&H iTranslator Net is a simple document-to-document translation tool for the internet. It lets users send text and other documents to a translation server, where they are translated then returned by email or by download. L&H iTranslator Net improves the accuracy of standard machine translation by offering the user specific domains or subject categories. For each of these categories, the server com-pares the document to a field-specific vocabulary that fur-ther improves translation accuracy. L&H iTranslator Net was created as a communication tool for individual users as well as employees using a corpo-rate intranet with frequent translation needs. It works either in real time with individual documents or in batch mode where the user might collect several documents and have them translated into one, two, or several different languages. The service is different from the stand-alone translation software such as L&H Power Translator Pro, which installs on a single user's computer. With L&H iTranslator Net, all translation is done on a much larger and more powerful remote server. No special software is required on the user's machine, so it can be used by anyone from any machine with access to the internet “Companies are becoming more global, with operations in many countries and real international diversity among employee groups. A lot of the value of that diversity is lost if employees can't communicate with each other in a fast and very convenient way.”

To: GC who wrote (527)	4/24/1999 12:41:00 PM
From: GC	Respond to of 767

page 4 L&H iTranslator Publish The second version is L&H iTranslator Publish, which is aimed at internet Web site publishers. It enables the pub-lisher or company to have all or part of its web site translat-ed and viewed in different languages and dynamically updat-ed as often as necessary. Publish is available to webmasters as a real-time translator where the visitor would simply click on a language button and the page would reload itself in the chosen language. Since it supports active server technology, the visitor could translate fixed data as well as dynamically changing information such as today's news, which might change every few minutes. Once the visitor translates a page, it remains in the cache, so that the next user will not have to re-translate, or the page can be set to translate into certain languages on a regular schedule. So if the user knows that some pages will need to be viewed everyday, he can set L&H iTranslator to translate those pages at the start of the day. Webmasters can choose to do all this with machine translation or, in the case of corpo-rate networks or intranets, send it off to a human translator. “Publish is a big application for web site translation,” says Bautil, “and chat is actually much bigger than anyone antic-ipated, but the real killer application is automatic transla-tion for email. Translating how business communicates “There's a very big need for this sort of immediate translation in the corporate world,” he says. “Companies are becoming more global, with operations in many countries and real international diversity among employee groups. A lot of the value of that diversity is lost if employees can't communicate with each other in a fast and very convenient way.” What might the future hold for internet translations? Bautil has some thoughts. “The genie is out of the bottle. Over the next few years, online machine translation for email, Web pages, reference documents, everything will become routine. The technology right now is very impres-sive, but the improvements will keep coming.” “We will start to see some important changes on the Web itself in coming months,” he adds. “More and more well-known sites will start including a translate option right on their pages. People will be chatting and emailing in multiple languages and never think about it.” “People in Asia and Europe would love to have access to invest-ment research or press releases in their own language. There's a whole new opportunity opening up. We really can't be a global village until we can understand each other. No more language barriers.” 4 Ratio of People Per Net Server Country Ratio of people per Net Server Finland 25 United States 50 Australia 60 Canada 70 Netherlands 90 Singapore 125 Britain 130 Germany 180 Israel 185 Hong Kong 310 Japan 470 Taiwan 850 South Africa 930 South Korea 1,550 Brazil 8,000 Thailand 15,000 Indonesia 87,000 China 561,000 India 1,200,000 WorldBlaze unveiled the most advanced language transla-tion site on the internet recently and announced a strategic partnership with L&H to provide instant, multilingual trans-lations. The site is the first to incorporate the L&H iTranslator technology. The WorldBlaze site, which is offered free to users at www.worldblaze.com uses a patented process that combines the finest translation tech-nology available with the fastest, most comprehensive search technology on the internet. WorldBlaze users can translate search queries, abstracts and Web pages on-the-fly into any WorldBlaze supported language. The translation is seamlessly integrated into the search process. The end-user simply clicks a language choice, and WorldBlaze brings him or her the World of that language translated into his or her native tongue. The trans-lations support Web searching, browsing, e-mail, document translations, and chat. All services are available through readily available, and typically free, client software applications, such as browsers and e-mail readers from Microsoft or Netscape. New internet site offers multilingual Web searches Source: Network Wizards, Killen & Assoc., and. eMarketer

To: GC who wrote (527)	4/24/1999 12:43:00 PM
From: GC	Respond to of 767

page 5............. Available exclusively at Staples L&H VoiceXpress™ Ultimate Suite First product to combine continuous speech recognition, language translation, and voice-powered accessories The L&H VoiceXpress Ultimate Suite combines the compa-ny's award-winning continuous speech dictation software with automatic translation in five languages and a suite of voice-powered accessories for controlling the PC and navi-gating the internet. The new software suite will be intro-duced across the U.S. in April by Staples, the largest opera-tor of office superstores with more than 900 locations. Designed especially for business professionals, the L&H Voice Xpress Ultimate Suite has a unique set of key features: L&H Voice Xpress — Create, edit and format documents in Microsoft Word 97/95, Excel 97, PowerPoint 97 and Outlook 98. Users can dictate up to 140 words per minute into virtually any Windows application with 95 percent or greater accuracy. The customizable 30,000-word active vocabulary can expand to 60,000 words. L&H Power Translator Pro — Sentence-based transla-tion. Users can translate documents or email mes-sages instantly in Lotus Notes Mail, Microsoft Mail, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Outlook. TalkingTools™ — A toolkit of voice-powered accessories. Voice WebFinder™ lets users ask a natural language question like “What is the population of the United States? and WebFinder will find an answer. Voice Scheduler™ enables users to easily create appointments and review schedules by voice. Voice AddressBook™ lets users find contacts and send e-mail mes-sages. Voice Calculator™ is a completely voice-enabled cal-culator. Voice Clock™ finds the current time anywhere in the world with atomic accuracy. For more information about either of these products, visit the L&H web site at www.lhs.com or call (800) 380-1234. Product Close-up Products and services from L&H and its divisions A Talking Parrot CyberPet L&H Talking Max™ The world's first virtual pet. Talk to him and he talks back. You can even train Max the parrot to obey commands in dif-ferent languages. You've never seen anything like this on your PC before. L&H Talking MAX™ is a hilarious talking pet for personal computers. Raised on a virtu-al parrot ranch especially for computer users of any age, Max uses L&H's advanced voice pattern recognition technology to understand a speaker regardless of sex, lan-guage, or accent. He then learns to associate phrases with specific actions and can engage users in complete conversations. L&H Talking MAX “lives” in a user's PC. After installa-tion, Max is “born” on the desktop, named, and assigned a personality: calm, lively, or hyperactive – any of which can change depending on his mood. Users can teach Max words, phrases, or complete dialogues. The Basic Training Wizard allows users to quickly train the parrot to say more than 50 phrases. The product also includes humorous con-versation scripts on sports, weather, and politics. Max can also learn to respond on cue to certain words and to say specific phrases when he performs certain tasks. For example, users can tell Max to fly into his on-screen feeding room for a snack, enter the bathroom for a bath, and even draw the shower curtain to relax in the tub. As a bonus, users can also convert L&H Talking MAX into a screen saver that will peck “holes” in the computer screen, paint pictures, and all the while keep up a lively banter. At any time, users can check on the parrot's mood, age, weight and educational progress. If he's sick or depressed, it's probably because the user failed to feed him a balanced diet of porridge and bananas, or maybe made his bath water too hot or too cold, or starved him for conversation and interaction. It's not easy owning a parrot like Max! 5

To: GC who wrote (527)	4/24/1999 12:55:00 PM
From: GC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 767

page 6 ............. 6 News Roundup: News and events from L&H and its divisions “For the first time ever, I am confident enough with a speech recognition program to dictate this entire review.” With that quote, Owen Linderholm of Windows Magazine began his recent review of L&H VoiceXpress™ Professional 2.0. A few hundred words later, he called the software, “The best voice recognition program available.” The review comes right on the heels of two similar awards at the industry-leading Comdex trade show in November. At Comdex, L&H Voice Xpress Professional received the 1998 Most Valuable Product award from PC Computing magazine and was one of only ten products from all categories to receive the Breakthrough Award from the magazine. PC Computing magazine presents the MVP award annually to the year's most outstanding business computing products in recognition of their achievements in “usability, innovation, performance, technology and value.” The Breakthrough Award recognizes a select group of innovative products that provide the blueprint for “how we will all work in the years ahead”. L&H Voice Xpress Professional is continuous speech dictation soft-ware designed for business professionals who use Microsoft Office ® . “L&H Voice Xpress Professional has been judged best in its class by our tough panel of editors, uncompro-mising technology experts,” said PC Computing editor Wendy Taylor. “It is the speech recognition product of choice for business technology buyers because it gives business professionals a strategic, competitive advantage in the workplace.” In his review for Windows, Linderholm said the software had “a vastly improved recognition engine, bet-ter speed, built-in support for more appli-cations, more vocabulary customization, the ability to import and export speaker profiles, playback from handheld voice recorders into Voice Xpress and the abili-ty to add macros.” He ended by saying that “for basic dic-tation accuracy and wide application support, L&H Voice Xpress Professional 2.0 is the new champion. It replaces Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred Edition 3.0 on the WinList.” L&H RealSpeak™ is introduced as the new standard in voice synthesis One of the most common complaints from users of today's best “talking” products continues to be “robotic” sounding synthesized voices produced by most text-to-speech engines. Those complaints are soon to be answered with a new voice synthesis technology that almost perfectly replicates the sound and quality of the human voice. Called RealSpeak, L&H engineers expect the new technology to establish a new industry standard in text-to-speech capability. RealSpeak uses pre-recorded fragments of real human speech to convert text into speech. According to the company, the L&H RealSpeak engine will be ideal for industries such as telephony, which require a very high quality voice and can support a large footprint engine. RealSpeak technology can handle the spoken responses required for dial-in banking, airline reservations, and other applications where high quality speech is critical. As a result, L&H RealSpeak is expected to boost usage of text-to-speech technology for telecommunica-tions and eventually in the auto and consumer electronics industries. L&H expects to release RealSpeak mid-year. It will initially support American English with German, British English, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Japanese, and Korean to follow. The engine will have an e-mail pre-processor for retrieval of e-mail over the phone that will intelli-gently process and interpret e-mail, exclude footers, filter headers, speak emoticons, and much more.

To: GC who wrote (527)	4/24/1999 1:17:00 PM
From: GC	Respond to of 767

page 10 ........... It's 1999. Sounds more like a price than a year, but here we are at the end of the millennium. Quite a moment in the grand scheme, but prepare yourself for a year of look-ing back. A year of remembering the events of the last 100 or 1000 years. But what then? Suddenly the clock will carry us over the top of Y2K and we'll be looking out at a vast new millennium. Like a child with a whole life ahead, it will seem end-less, limitless. From that moment on, there will be no more talk of the past, only the future. What sort of a future might it be? For some, like Ray Kurzweil, inven-tor, engineer, entrepreneur, and now one of L&H's most prolific futurists, the years of the next century and beyond are already familiar. He's anticipated the future for most of his adult life, and then some. Now, he's the author of a thought-provoking new book that's just arrived in bookstores. The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, takes the reader for a mind-twisting look at where comput-ers are headed and what might very well await us on the other side of Y2K. With permission from the pub-lisher, Viking Press, we've excerpted a few glimpses. The computer Itself It is now 2009. Individuals primarily use portable computers, which have become dramatically lighter and thin-ner than the notebook computers of ten years earlier. Personal computers are available in a wide range of sizes and shapes, and are commonly embedded into clothing and jewelry such as wristwatches, rings, earrings, and other body ornaments. The majority of text is created using continuous speech recognition dicta-tion software. It is very accurate, far more so than the human transcrip-tionists, who were used up until a few years ago. Computers routinely include moving picture image cameras and are able to reliably identify their owners from their faces. Education The generation of paper documents is dwindling as the books and other papers of largely 20th century vintage are being rapidly scanned and stored. Documents, circa 2009, routinely include embedded moving images and sounds. Students of all ages typically have a computer of their own, a thin tablet-like device weighing under a pound with very high-resolution display suitable for reading. Students interact with their computers primarily by voice and by pointing with a device that looks like a pencil. Learning at a distance is com-monplace. Learning is becoming a significant portion of most jobs. Training and devel-oping new skills is emerging as an ongo-ing responsibility in most careers, not just an occasional supplement, as the level of skills needed for meaningful employment soars even higher. An excerpt from The Age of Spiritual Machines, the controversial new book by L&H Technology Advisor Ray Kurzweil Imagine a world where the difference between man and machine blurs, where the line between technology and humanity fades, and where the soul and the silicon chip unite.