Lernout & Hauspie, AsiaWorks Form Strategic Partnership to Introduce Chinese Dictation Products.BEIJING--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 1, 1998-- Partnership Strengthens L&H Offerings and Marketing for the Far East; Products Showcased at Intel International Speech Forum Lernout & Hauspie (Nasdaq: LHSPF, Easdaq: LHSP LHSP List Hosting Service Provider LHSP Left Handed Starting Pitcher ) (L&H), a worldwide market leader in speech and linguistic technologies, products, and services, today announced that it has invested $5 million in cash in AsiaWorks, a leader in speech-enabled technologies for the Asian market. With this investment, L&H expects to gain access to a world-class speech technology team headed by Yen-Lu Chow, a former Apple scientist. The investment, representing 49.5% of AsiaWorks' issued shares, will give L&H the exclusive rights to AsiaWorks Chinese languages Chinese languages or Sinitic languages Family of languages comprising one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan. They are spoken by about 95% of the inhabitants of China and by many communities of Chinese immigrants elsewhere. technologies that combine continuous speech dictation, hand-writing recognition and full sentence phonetic keyboard input. L&H plans to be the first speech industry vendor to introduce their products worldwide in early 1999. L&H has had continuous speech recognition products for U.S. and U.K. English, and recently introduced a product for German. The company expects to introduce support for several additional languages including French, Spanish, Dutch, Arabic and Japanese in early 1999. "The Chinese language market is an ideal environment for products that combine a speech-enabled user interface with pen and keyboard input recognition," said Gaston Bastiaens Gaston Bastiaens (Westerlo (Belgium) December 16, 1946) is a Belgian engineer and businessman. As a vice president of Philips Electronics, he was responsible for the Compact Disc as well as for CD-i, CD-ROM, Philips' contributions to the MPEG standard and the foundations for the , president & CEO (1) (Chief Executive Officer) The highest individual in command of an organization. Typically the president of the company, the CEO reports to the Chairman of the Board. of Lernout & Hauspie. "Because of the extensive and complex character sets in Chinese languages, the traditional PC keyboard (1) Any keyboard made for the PC. (2) The keyboard introduced with the first IBM PC in 1981 that provided a dual-function keypad for numeric entry and cursor movement. is not the best solution. The introduction of software with continuous speech dictation, hand-writing recognition and keyboard input will give users flexible, easy-to use options that will help dramatically simplify Asian computing and support increased use of the PC in that market." Relationship Expands Asian Marketing The L&H/AsiaWorks partnership will provide L&H with new products for the Asian market and exclusive distribution rights and also adds to its sales and marketing efforts in that region. L&H recently opened an office in Tokyo to service the Asia Pacific market. Some market analysts estimate the potential personal computer-product customer base in mainland China alone to be 1.2 billion people. "Our partnership with L&H provides us with the technical and financial resources to expand our Asian market offerings and develop even more innovative services," said Dr. Louis K. Woo, managing director of AsiaWorks. "It is our belief that speech recognition will be a compelling solution not only in the personal computer industry, but also for mobile computing Using a computing device while in transit. Mobile computing implies wireless transmission, but wireless transmission does not necessarily imply mobile computing. Fixed wireless applications use satellites, radio systems and lasers to transmit between permanent objects such as buildings devices, mobile telecommunication devices, consumer electronics, etc." Engine Recognizes Speech, Handwriting Under the terms of the strategic partnership, L&H will also acquire the exclusive distribution rights worldwide of AsiaWorks' speech-pen-keyboard (SPK SPK Speaker SPK Spokane (Washington) SPK Sermaye Piyasasi Kurulu SPK Slipknot (band) SPK Simultaneous Pancreas-Kidney Transplantation SPK Secret Provision for Kira (manga) ) products, including its Awin-SPK1. The SPK supports continuous speech dictation, cursive handwriting recognition Handwriting recognition is the ability of a computer to receive intelligible handwritten input. The image of the written text may be sensed "off line" from a piece of paper by optical scanning (optical character recognition). and full sentence phonetic keyboard input. According to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. AsiaWorks, a number of factors particular to Chinese language and culture should make its handwriting recognition capability popular in the Asian market. The variety of dialects in the Mandarin language the spoken or colloquial language of educated people in China. See also: Mandarin coupled with the fact that most people speak Mandarin with very heavy accents makes development of high accuracy speech engines challenging. Additionally, many Asian offices have open floor plans because of the scarcity of space. When users want to write something confidential or personal, or they are speaking a Mandarin dialect, handwriting recognition is an attractive alternative to speech or keyboard input. Products Demonstrated at Forum While at the Intel International Speech Forum AsiaWorks will demonstrate for the first time its AwinSPK products. The company will also demonstrate developers' applications that embed its speech-pen-keyboard (SPK) technologies, including a Chinese enabling system, a word processor, a business management application and an edutainment Educational material that is also entertaining. (application) edutainment - Interactive education and entertainment services or software, usually supplied commercially via a cable network or on CD-ROM. title. Lernout & Hauspie will also participate in the conference where it will demonstrate its Voice Xpress Pro(TM) and Power Translator products. Executives from both L&H and AsiaWorks will deliver presentations during the Keynote session and other sessions of the conference. About AsiaWorks AsiaWorks is a Singapore based company founded in 1997. Its products include AWin-SPK 1.0, a continuous speech dictation, and cursive handwriting recognition and full sentence phonetic keyboard input offering introduced in the fall of 1998. AsiaWorks has been designated the official SPK input provider for the Singapore government's recently launched National Chinese Internet Program. The company is developing other SPK offerings for Mainland China and the Asia Pacific markets. About Lernout & Hauspie Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products (L&H) is a global leader in advanced speech and language solutions for computers, automobiles, telecommunications, embedded products, consumer goods consumer goods Any tangible commodity purchased by households to satisfy their wants and needs. Consumer goods may be durable or nondurable. Durable goods (e.g., autos, furniture, and appliances) have a significant life span, often defined as three years or more, and and the Internet. The company is making the speech user interface (SUI Sui (swā), dynasty of China that ruled from 581 to 618. This short-lived dynasty reunified China in 589 after 400 years of division and laid the foundation for further consolidation under the T'ang dynasty. ) the keystone of simple, convenient interaction between humans and technology, and is using advanced translation technology to break down cultural barriers. L&H's products and services originate in Verb 1. originate in - come from stem - grow out of, have roots in, originate in; "The increase in the national debt stems from the last war" four basic areas: automatic speech recognition (ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) Using voice recognition to replace keypad entry for telephone voice menus. Typically used to speak the digits 0 through 9 insted of keying them, ASR systems may be able to recognize a limited vocabulary. See voice recognition and AVSR. ), text-to-speech (TTS (1) See text-to-speech. (2) (Transaction Tracking System) Software that monitors a transaction until completion. In the event of a hardware or software failure, it ensures that the database is brought back to its former state before the attempt to ), digital speech and music compression (SMC SMC Saint Mary's College SMC Santa Monica College SMC Solaris Management Console SMC Smooth Muscle Cell SMC Small Magellanic Cloud (also see LMC) SMC Safety Management Certificate (maritime shipping) ) and text-to-text (translation). For more information, please visit Lernout & Hauspie on the World Wide Web at www.lhs.com. This Press Release contains forward-looking information, including but not limited to statements regarding L&H's expectations and intentions concerning the development and commercialization activities of L&H and AsiaWorks. There can be no assurance that actual results will not be materially different than those anticipated in these forward-looking statements. Factors which could cause actual results to materially differ from those anticipated in these forward looking statements include known and unknown risks, including without limitation, the uncertainty of new product development by either L&H or AsiaWorks, the ability of L&H and AsiaWorks to work together effectively, the early stage of development of the speech and language technology markets, uncertainty of market growth, rapid technological change and intense competition, as well as other risks set forth in L&H's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. There can be no assurance that L&H and AsiaWorks will be able to successfully develop any of the anticipated new products or that once developed, such products will perform as expected or be commercially successful. L&H cautions readers not to place undue reliance upon any such forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date made. L&H expressly disclaims any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to any such statements to reflect any change in the L&H's expectations or any change in events, conditions or circumstance on which any such statement is based. |
|
||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion