Despite the recent disintegration of speech technology company
Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products (L&H), the technology
that it helped pioneer continues to move off the desktop PC and
onto mobile devices.
The problems at Belgium-based L&H multiplied this week when
former chief executive officer Gaston Bastiaens was arrested at his
home in Massachusetts, nearly one month after co-founders Jo
Lernout and Pol Hauspie were arrested in Belgium.
The executives were arrested for questioning on charges of
financial fraud, stock price manipulation, and other charges,
authorities said.
While leading companies such as Dragon Systems and Dictaphone have
already gone, the fate of L&H is still up in the air. The
Belgian government is expected to decide next week if L&H will
be allowed to sell off its assets as separate companies rather than
as individual assets.
The plan is to divide L&H into four separate companies each
seeking its own buyers, said Bill Meisel, a speech technology
analyst and president of TMA Associates, who was recently briefed
by L&H on the sell-off.
The four companies would comprise L&H's healthcare operations,
formerly part of Dictaphone, and a call centre and recording
business that holds a major market share in recording 911 calls,
Meisel said.
Mendez Translation services - staffed by human translators, would
also be sold as a group. The same might be true for the Speech and
Language Systems division, which might keep the name L&H,
Miesel said.
"It might make sense for Microsoft to look at their Language
Systems division," Meisel added.
Although L&H may soon disappear, other companies are rapidly
developing a different perspective on speech technology. Called
multimodal access, companies such as Auvo Technologies are
promoting speech technology as a way of offering mobile solutions
for the workforce.
Multimodal technology uses a combination of graphic, touchscreen,
and voice interfaces to allow access to data.
Microsoft, which launched Office XP this week with speech
recognition built in, is also developing multimodal access
technology for its Windows CE handheld platform and the forthcoming
Windows XP.
"We are working on this project. You click with the stylus to
select a field then speak to fill in the field," said Alex Acero,
manager of the speech research group at Microsoft.
Auvo, using the speech engine from Nuance Communications, is
currently selling to wireless carriers and has a trial agreement
with Vodaphone AirTel in Spain. The company will officially launch
its multimodal handset browser in the third quarter.
The technology has two parts: a client speech-compression component
for transmission over an IP network, and a back-end platform on the
network side for converting the speech to data.
Workers in the United States, however, will have to wait for
multimodal handsets. Unlike Europe's GSM (Global System for Mobile
communications) network, current US cellular technology cannot
handle a voice and data channel simultaneously.
The likelihood of the alleged misdeeds of L&H executives
tarnishing the sector's image and thus setting back the deployment
of speech technology is small, according to industry experts.
"Companies in every industry have had problems including businesses
where credibility is critical, such as financial services. If a
bank is dishonest [it] doesn't mean we stop banking," said Amy
Wohl, a speech technology analyst and editor of Opinions, an online
newsletter.