Voice Processing: Intel and Lernout & Hauspie to Form New Venture. New Entity to Develop E-Commerce and Telephony Solutions Using L&H's Speech and Language Technologies; Intel Finalizes $30 Million Investment in L&H - Company Business and Marketing

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, May 10, 1999

Intel Corporation and Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products (L&H) Wednesday announced that they have signed a definitive agreement to form a venture to develop e-commerce and telephony solutions using L&H's speech and language technologies.

The new venture will combine many of L&H's speech and language technologies, such as L&H's Natural Language Technology (NLT), intelligent content management (ICM), machine translation and speech synthesis, such as L&H's recently announced RealSpeak technology, with Intel's expertise in performance computing platforms. The goal is to provide a new level of e-commerce and telephony solutions for users worldwide.

"L&H has long recognized the integral role speech and language technologies play in simplifying and enhancing solutions for the Internet, e-commerce and telephony market segments," said Gaston Bastiaens, president and CEO of L&H. "Our complete offering of technologies and solutions support the industry's broadest range of languages and enable us to provide speech and language software and services to users in these market, and many others worldwide."

"Combining Intel's leadership in the high performance, connected computing platforms together with L&H's leading technologies presents exciting possibilities for web-based products and services," said Ron Whittier, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Content Group. "A voice interface presents a natural, intuitive method for people to get the information they need - via PCs, connected smart devices and the telephone."

"The combined technologies of L&H and Intel can to make e-commerce and other applications more attractive by supporting natural speech commands, human-sounding synthesized speech, accurate machine translation and faster, simpler data query and retrieval," said Jo Lernout, co-founder of L&H. "We believe that this new venture with Intel builds upon our expertise and that these technologies will play a role in helping to further solutions for diverse industries." New Venture Agreement

The venture will be owned 51 percent by Intel Corporation and 49 percent by L&H. Each company will have representation on the board of directors. The new company will be based in L&H's Flanders Valley facility in Ieper, Belgium and in Santa Clara, California and will be staffed initially by employees from both companies. Intel Investment Completed

L&H announced on April 5, 1999, that Intel had signed a letter of intent to invest $30 million in L&H in the form of non-voting securities and non-interest bearing convertible into L&H common stock. Today, the companies announced that Intel had completed its investment. About Intel

Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, is also a leading manufacturer of computer, networking and communications products. Additional information about Intel is available at www.intel.com/pressroom. About Lernout & Hauspie Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) is a global leader in advanced speech and language solutions for vertical markets, computers, automobiles, telecommunications, embedded products, consumer goods and the Internet. The company is making the speech user interface (SUI) the keystone of simple, convenient interaction between humans and technology, and is using advanced translation technology to break down language barriers. The company provides a wide range of offerings, including: customized solutions for corporations; core speech technologies marketed to OEMs; end user and retail applications for continuous speech products in horizontal and vertical markets; and document creation, human and machine translation services, Internet translation offerings, and linguistic tools.

L&H's products and services originate in four basic areas: automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), digital speech and music compression (SMC) and text-to-text (translation). For more information, please visit Lernout & Hauspie on the World Wide Web at www.lhsl.com.

BayStar Capital, managed by Lawrence Goldfarb, acted as advisor to L&H on this transaction.