Philips Presents Speechmagic 6.1 - Healthcare Speech Recognition Turns Industrial-Grade.

VIENNA, Austria -- Royal Philips Electronics (NYSE:PHG) (AEX:PHI) announced today that the upcoming version of its document creation platform SpeechMagic will contain unique features which optimize the accuracy, security and administration of medical document creation. SpeechMagic 6.1 boosts speech recognition accuracy and scalability has been raised to up to 15,000 users per cluster. The software architecture allows for fully centralized administration and management, facilitating integration with medical IT systems such as Electronic Medical Records (EMR) systems. By working closely with end users, SpeechMagic 6.1 has been further adapted for documentation-intensive environments, accelerating the spread of speech-recognition based medical reporting.

The Advanced Resolution Channel introduced with the next-generation speech recognizer has further reduced the error rate by 30%. Speaker Detection, a unique feature which protects individual speakers' settings, adds to this: When several physicians share a workstation, an author may accidentally dictate using another speaker's voice profile. SpeechMagic 6.1 detects whether or not the author and voice profile correspond - leaving the active profile intact and protecting individual dictation characteristics. To further support speech recognition accuracy, sophisticated learning algorithms enable SpeechMagic to automatically and immediately adapt to the dictation style and pronunciation of each author.

To enhance the transcription workflow, SpeechMagic now calculates the amount of correction a recognized text will require and intelligently routes the document to the most suitable transcriptionist. This gives hospitals new management options: Documents with a high error rate, for example, can be sent directly to an external transcription service, with accurate texts going to in-house transcriptionists.

"We have focused our efforts and expertise on enhancing our document creation platform for easier integration with Electronic Medical Record and Hospital Information Systems. SpeechMagic 6.1 provides unique features that reflect the needs of physicians and hospital administrators for higher efficiency, security and flexibility in medical document creation," says Marcel Wassink, Managing Director Philips Speech Recognition Systems.

Further technology highlights

--Gender Detection automatically selects the corresponding profile for untrained authors to optimize recognition accuracy.

--Full support of multi-processor machines allows hospitals to save hardware costs by using multiple instances of backend speech recognition on one machine. Frontend speech recognition may also be used together with other resource-intensive applications like Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) on a single computer.

--Backend processes have been turned into Windows Services, which fulfills IT security criteria for professional environments.

--Scalability has been raised from 4,000 to 15,000 users per cluster.

--Full backward compatibility allows for an easy upgrade from SpeechMagic 5.1; all user adaptations will be transferred to the new version.

SpeechMagic will be released to the Philips global network of more than 200 integration partners in May 2005. In the United States, Crescendo, Dolbey, Epic, Healthcare Technologies, MedQuist and other Philips partners use reporting solutions powered by SpeechMagic. Leading international healthcare companies such as AGFA Healthcare, GE Healthcare, Kodak Health, Philips Medical Systems and Siemens Medical Solutions use SpeechMagic to speech-enable their medical IT solutions.

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About Royal Philips Electronics

Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHI) is one of the world's biggest electronics companies and Europe's largest, with sales of $37.7 billion (EUR 30.4 billion) in 2005. With activities in the three interlocking domains of healthcare, lifestyle and technology and 159,200 employees in more than 60 countries, it has market leadership positions in medical diagnostic imaging and patient monitoring, color television sets, electric shavers, lighting and silicon system solutions. News from Philips is located at www.philips.com/newscenter and www.philips.com/speechrecognition.