Unisys and L&H Announce Alliance in Speech Recognition - resell Unysis e-@ction Natural Language Speech Assistant - Company Business and Marketing

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, Jan 17, 2000

Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) and Unisys Corporation Monday announced an alliance that will help drive the development of speech enabled solutions by providing a full complement of leading-edge tools that enable quick, easy and cost-effective application creation. As part of the alliance, Unisys will resell L&H's speech recognition and text-to-speech technology with its award-winning Unisys e-@ction Natural Language Speech Assistant (NLSA) developers tool set. In turn, L&H will resell the Unisys NLSA software to its customers for use with L&H's own speech technologies. The alliance, which extends a relationship between the two companies that began in 1996, enables customers to obtain the fully integrated Unisys and L&H software from either company.

"The demand for speech-enabled applications is increasing daily, therefore developers are demanding a complete solution that will speed and simplify the development process," said Gerald Calabrese, Senior Vice President of World Wide Sales for L&H. "By offering Unisys's award-winning NLSA in conjunction with our industry leading speech recognition and text-to-speech engines, we're providing developers with a comprehensive tool kit to create world-class applications and enabling them to deliver products to the market faster."

"There continues to be strong demand from our customers for using L&H speech tools in their projects," said Joe Yaworski, head of the Natural Language Understanding business initiative at Unisys. "With our NLSA tools, combined with L&H's ASR 1500 and TTS 3000 engines, developers now have a complete, easy-to-use development platform that will enable them to deploy speech-based applications quickly and easily in a fraction of the time required for more traditional development methods."

"Telephone speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis are growing rapidly in several areas--call centers, voice portals to the Internet, and making telephone service more flexible and friendly. The L&H-Unisys partnership gives developers another important option." stated William Meisel, Editor, Speech Recognition Update, a speech industry newsletter in Tarzana, CA.

Technologies Support Range of Telephony Applications

L&H's automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech engines are among the most popular choices for developers creating speech-enabled applications for a wide variety of markets, including automotive, telephony, computers and multi-media. The Unisys NLSA software is the first and only cross-platform, end-to-end solution for the rapid deployment of speech-based applications for electronic business and other mission-critical requirements. It is capable of automatically generating the grammars and programming code required to implement speech applications on a wide variety of different platforms. Together, the Unisys and L&H technologies give developers a broad range of best of breed tools with which to develop diverse speech-enabled applications.

L&H's Telephony Solutions

L&H offers a full suite of telephony engine solutions that range from a large vocabulary recognizer to small vocabulary recognizer engines to a variety of text to speech engines, including the human sounding L&H RealSpeak engine -- each available for a variety of platforms, languages and environments. The combination of these products enables L&H to offer a complete solution to developers and vendors who want to voice-enable the next generation applications in a wide range of industries.

Unisys is an electronic business solutions company whose 35,000 employees help customers in 100 countries apply information technology to seize opportunities and overcome challenges of the Internet economy. Unisys people integrate and deliver the solutions, services, platforms and network infrastructure required by business and government to transform their organizations for success in this new era. The company offers a rich portfolio of Unisys e-@ction Solutions for electronic business based on its expertise in "repeatable" vertical industry solutions, network services, outsourcing, systems integration and multivendor support, coupled with enterprise-class server and related technologies. The primary vertical markets Unisys serves worldwide include financial services, transportation, communications, publishing and commercial sectors, as well as the public sector, including federal government customers. Unisys is headquartered in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, in the Greater Philadelphia area. For more information on the company, access the Unisys home page on the World Wide Web at www.unisys.com.

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.