Lernout & Hauspie: new priorities

Lernout and Hauspie Speech Products, the Flemish speech processing outfit, has spun off all of its hard-, and software activities to Stentor Speech Products, a new company based in Rijswijk, the Netherlands. Stentor will take over all of LHSP’s responsibilities in terms of products and services, while LHSP will henceforth concentrate solely on developing and marketing algorithms. Stentor is now offering, for example, 16-bit PC expansion boards for text-to-speech in Dutch, German, English, and Korean..
    In early April, LHSP also announced an agreement with Analog Devices (Norwood, MA, USA), the world’s premier supplier of digital signal processors (dsp), whereby LHSP will provide multilingual speech recognition, multilingual text-to-speech, and low bit-rate coding algorithms for Analog to implement in its dsp chips. dsp chips form a vital link in converting information from analog to digital form (and back again) in such devices as speech recognizers and synthesizers, modems, cd players, and image processing systems.
    Applications such as multimedia, handwriting recognition, and voice processing tend to overwhelm the current generation of microprocessors, such as Intel’s 80386 chip family. According to Analog, if, however, the complex signal-processing tasks are off- loaded to dedicated processors, a 80386 can easily orchestrate the underlying program flow. The NeXT computer already has a dsp chip as standard equipment; rapidly falling prices for such chips may mean that an analog/digital device will be a standard component on the motherboard of the next gener- ation of other desktop pcs.
    These developments represent something of a shift in the direction of LHSP. Established in 1988 with a strong influx of Flemish venture capital, the company threw itself into the development of speech recognition, text-to-speech, and speech digitizing software, with an ambitious research program encompassing hardware development and even chip design at its headquarters in Ypres, Belgium. Having also passed development of foreign language versions of DragonDictate 30k back to Dragon Systems, Lernout & Hauspie appear now to be concentrating on core activities, presumably because the speech processing market has yet to generate the kind of revenues to support such hefty R&D bills.

Lernout & Hauspie Speechproducts Rozendaalstraat 14, 8900 Ypres, Belgium Tel +32 57 21 95 00, Fax +32 57 20 84 89

Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products USA 800 West Cummings Park, Woburn, ma 01801, USA Tel +1 617 932-4118, Fax +1 617 932-9209.

Stentor Speech Products Patrijsweg 56, 2289 ex Rijswijk, The Netherlands Tel. +31 70 3987234, Fax +31 70 3987223