Lernout & Hauspie Brings Continuous Dictation to Handheld Devices for the First Time - Company Business and Marketing

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, Feb 14, 2000

Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) Monday showcased solutions that highlight how it is moving speech and language technologies beyond the desktop to a growing number of handheld, mobile and wireless devices, significantly increasing the ease of use and utility of those devices. L&H demonstrated an industry first: its prototype handheld device that has a large vocabulary continuous speech dictation engine to easily send and receive e-mail, surf the Web and conduct e-commerce transactions. It also showcased a customer's solution that combines L&H's speech user interface with a cordless phone system to allow small businesses and home offices to manage communications from any phone, anywhere in the world. The demonstrations took place in Indian Wells at the Demo 2000 conference, held from February 6th through 8th.

The solutions demonstrated by L&H at the Demo conference add to the growing number of handheld, portable and wireless platforms and devices that can be speech enabled with L&H technologies. The L&H offerings have been designed to fill the growing need for a simplified input and output mechanism for devices with limited display and input capacity and that are often used in situations where "hands-free" operation is required (such as an automobile).

"The small size and portability of PDAs, handheld and mobile devices has made them tremendously popular, and at the same time has provided a huge opportunity for the speech industry," said Gaston Bastiaens, president and CEO of L&H. "Most users employ handheld and mobile devices on the go, often requiring `hands free' use. Most also find that manual information input and output is awkward because of the small size of handheld and mobile devices. The most intuitive, logical solution to this dilemma is a speech-enabled interface that allows users and machines to communicate in a simple, natural, hands-free manner."

Industry's First Large Vocabulary Speech for Linux PDA While at the conference, L&H demonstrated its patent-pending, prototype handheld device for Linux platforms equipped with its large vocabulary speech recognition engine - an industry first -and its L&H RealSpeak text-to-speech (TTS) technology engine. During the presentation L&H demonstrated how users can employ the device to "listen" to e-mail summaries as well as full-text e-mails; issue natural language commands such as "next message" or "send e-mail"; and dictate e-mails. As part of its live presentation, L&H also demonstrated how its solutions allow a user with a wireless Web connection to make simple web queries ("What is the Weather in Fresno"; complete an e-commerce transaction, such as purchasing a book from Amazon.com; and conduct a stock trade execution on Etrade or Charles Schwab .com ("i.e. buy 200 share of Eink").

"Speech User Interfaces (SUI) make PDA's easier and faster to use," said Amy Wohl, president of Wohl Associates. "They provide an important interface option for users and will expand the market to more users and applications."

CyberGenie Uses Speech to Give Small Businesses Virtual Personal Assistant L&H customer Cygnion Corporation demonstrated its CyberGenie CG 2400, a multi-line, multi-user, expandable PC Cordless Phone System. It uses an L&H-based speech-enabled interface to help small offices and home offices cost effectively manage their communications from any phone, anywhere in the world. CyberGenie's Virtual Personal Assistant system employs L&H's multi-lingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) and its TTS technology powered by CyberGenie@Work software. This enables users to access their contact database via telephone, to receive notification anywhere in the world of voice mail, e-mail and fax receipts and to have e-mail and faxes read to them in their originating language.

The CG 2400 also uses L&H's ASR and TTS technologies to support its voice activated or DTMF personal assistant, allowing calls placed to the small business to be answered by the system and prompting the caller to simply speak the name of the person they wish to speak to.

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. 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). FMI: www.lhs.com or www.lhsl.com.