Belgian company Lernout & Hauspie NV is showing off its latest range of speech technology offerings at Comdex this week. Voice Xpress is a continuous dictation, command and control product for the PC, a voice paging application capable of receiving, storing and reading compressed voice messages. It is the latest in a series of continuous speech products that the ten year old company has launched in recent times (CI No 3,267), and integrates continuous speech with command and control functionality using natural language processing. The company also launched new internet translation capabilities aimed to simplify access to multi-lingual information on the internet, which will convert web pages and other digitized information into a user’s native language, and the company is planning to launch a pilot service by the end of the year, with full product by the middle of next year. The company previewed an early version of its Voice Pager application, using low bit-rate voice compression technology to replay voice messages on a small wireless pager terminal. The pager can accept, store and replay up to 30 messages, lasting up to 20 seconds each, that have been transmitted via an ordinary telephone. Lernout & Hauspie also promised Arabic and Japanese language versions of its existing products, which are expected to emerge at some point next year.
