Royal Philips Electronics and WinScribe Announce Global Distribution Partnership Agreement

VIENNA, AUSTRIA, and AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND - Royal Philips Electronics and the New Zealand-based provider of dictation products WinScribe announced a global distribution partnership agreement. WinScribe will only integrate and promote Philips SpeechMagic in its digital dictation solutions and distribute it in the United States, Europe and Asia-Pacific region. WinScribe has a sales partner network of more than 50 companies in North America. In the first stage, Philips will offer speech recognition for the medical and legal markets in the United States and will broaden its focus to other industries in the near future. According to a report on the creation of documents in the healthcare sector in the United States, total costs for information captures and report generation are an estimated $50 billion annually for this segment only. According to Philips, using digital dictation and speech recognition will not only significantly ease the report creation process but also positively affect the economics of healthcare by achieving efficiency gains in document creation processes of up to 50 percent. Marcel Wassink, managing director, Philips Speech Processing, says: "It is our goal to become the leading provider of integrated professional speech recognition in the U.S. within 2 years. WinScribe's large reseller network and installed customer base will provide a much faster market penetration for SpeechMagic." WinScribe's existing customer base can upgrade their digital dictation systems to speech recognition. Matthew Weavers, managing director, WinScribe says: "SpeechMagic is a highly customizable technology with advanced speech recognition features which has been developed exclusively for professional users - all of this will contribute to maintaining the high standards in innovation and quality we have set in the market."