Learnout & Hauspie, Developers Show New Offerings at Technology Day
Lernout and Hauspie Speech Products opened its Technology Days showcase to industry analysts and media recently at a two-day forum addressing the future of speech technology and demonstrating cutting-edge speech-enabled applications.
Held at LandH offices in Burlington, Mass., the Technology Days offered a glimpse of just released and soon to be released products which use LandH's four core speech recognition technologies - automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), text-to-text translation and speech and music compression.
"This event helps emphasize how speech and language technologies are quickly becoming an integral part of a wide variety of commercial applications. In the future we believe speech technology will serve as the basis for all man machine interfaces," said Gaston Bastiaens, president and CEO of Lernout and Hauspie. "LandH has long held this vision for the market and maintains a company strategy to offer a complete line of top-quality speech recognition.
Presentations examined the growing influence of speech technology on mainstream businesses and consumer applications.
Among the LandH technologies displayed were:
Kurzweil VoiceCommand - an entry-level continuous speech, command-and-control product, Kurzweil VoiceCommand allows the user of voice instead of the mouse and keyboard to accomplish tasks typically controlled through the menus and dialogs of Microsoft Word. VoiceCommand increases under productivity by recognizing naturally spoken words to edit and format Word documents.
VoiceCommand is a product that directly benefited from LandH's acquisition of Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, as the move accelerated the company's development work for continuous dictation products.
Madison Project - this application leverages LandH's TTS technology by converting text documents to speech with an easy to use drag and drop toolbar. By tightly integrating LandH TTS technology with the Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0 operating systems, Madison has speech-enabled the user operating environment. In addition to reading documents, Madison will provide spoken notification of user defined events such as appointments, reminders and incoming e-mails.
LandH Stream Talk for Java - The LandH StreamTalk for Java solution enables software developers and Web publishers to incorporate speech and music into their Web browser-based applications. Stream Talk for Java allows developers to create a single speech application that can be run on a variety of computer using different operating systems.
SpeechSynch Toolbox - A new software application for game developers and animators, the SpeechSynch Toolbox is a program which allows developers to align the movement of an animated character's mouth to pre-recorded speech. Designed for use in multi media software and animated sequences, SpeechSynch significantly improves the appearance and realism of digital character's speech, while reducing development time and costs.
In addition to LandH product demonstrations at Technology Days, several customers showcased some of their products which incorporate LandH's core technology. Demonstrations included:
Home Automated Living - (HAL) a producer of home automation software, demonstrated its HAL2000 product, which enables users, via telephone, to deliver spoken commands to control their home systems such as heat, lighting and security, as well as to receive, via spoken voice, e-mail messages and Internet accessed information such as stock quotes, sport scores and weather reports. The system also employees LandH's continuous speech dictation engine to allow users to compose e-mail replies via telephone.
Concierge, Inc. demonstrated its Personal Communications Assistant (PCA) unified messaging application which includes such features as user dial-up and retrieval of e-mail , fax and voice messages.
Keyware, a technology integrator and software development firm, showcased its Keyware S2 Security system, the industry's first server software to combine both facial and voice verification technologies in a single integrated security system. Using industry-leading verification from LandH and image matching technology from Excalibur, S2 Security is ideal for wide range of building security, access control and secure interactive applications.
Registry Magic showed its Human User Interface technology which, included in a suite of products, allows computers to have conversations with callers, take orders over the phone, suggest products, gather market data and use a voice driven calendar scheduling application.