Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products NV, the hot Belgian speech recognition company, has announced it is spending $40m of the $150m cash raised from a recent bond issue on the acquisition of The Dictation Consortium NV, a Dutch dictation software developer. The Dictation Consortium has been building its continuous dictation software since 1986, co-developing it in conjunction with L&H. L&H has always held an option to purchase the rights to the product and that option has now been exercised. L&H said it expects the purchase to be accretive to earnings, after the obligatory write off of in-process R&D to negate troublesome amortization charges. In a separate announcement, L&H said it would also be licensing Motorola Inc’s Chinese speech technology components for use in a Chinese dictation product.
