Following the announcement of Microsoft Corp’s $45m, 8% stake in Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products NV (CI No 3,245) the Belgian speech recognition software company has revealed that it has the option to issue Microsoft with warrants for a further 2% stake, priced at $15m. The option must be exercised within a year. According to the Wall Street Journal, an agreement between the two companies calls for Lernout & Hauspie to grant Microsoft with worldwide, exclusive, perpetual and fully paid licenses to certain of its speech recognition patents. In return, Microsoft will grant L&H non-exclusive rights to patents in the same area. Alongside speech recognition, L&H is working on an automatic, multi-lingual text to text translation service for use with search engines and browsers on the web. The company has been externally acquisitive recently in its attempts to speed up the development work.
