By Jo Maitland at Comdex
Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products NV is planning to create and spin-off three new organizations next year, company chairman and CEO, Gaston Bastiaens has told ComputerWire. During an interview at Comdex in Las Vegas yesterday, Bastiaens said the company is shifting gear to focus on more partnerships rather than just licensing its technology. Currently L&H has over 700 companies licensing its speech engines. Next year the company will announce three key partnerships in the areas of telephony, healthcare and consulting and services which will form the basis of three spin- off organizations, Bastiaens said.
L&H Healthcare Solutions is likely to be the first separate legal entity which he says is expected to attract hundreds of millions of dollars alone in revenue as a separate business. The new company will have separate management from Lernout & Hauspie, operating as a wholly owned subsidiary. Bastiaens said this will happen in the coming months, but could not be more specific. We are lining up partnerships, he said.
The second company will be a consulting and services business focusing on document management services. According to L&H this is a $4bn market today, of which L&H only represents $100m, Bastiaens said. By turning this operation into a standalone company L&H believes it will be worth much more than if it remained a division inside the organization. This services and consulting business will have a separate web site called L&H iTranslator online for globalization services. By 2003, over half of internet users will be non-native English speakers, said Bastiaens. He added that this product will go beyond localization services that simply turn text from English into whichever language is required. It will enable French speakers translate to German or Russian or whatever language they require, rather than just English, he said.
L&H is working on services such as real-time translation as a free service for small amounts of text and one or two pennies per word for larger documents. Documents containing specialist terminology will cost more as with the generic solution quality is not good enough, according to Bastiaens. Another service will be post editing to dot the i’s and cross the t’s, done using the company’s iTranslator master product. L&H plans to license these services to ISPs and other portal sites and share the revenue.
The third organization will focus on speech technology for the telephony market. Bastiaens said the company is working on a deal with Reuters news agency to use its Realspeak server. This will let Reuters send text onto the internet and have it translated into the voice of a broadcaster. Hollywood is also interested in this technology to preserve the voices of actors that do famous carton characters, Bastiaens said. He added that companies like AT&T need L&H’s voice compression technology for their cell phone networks which are currently over-subscribed. Using this technology they can save millions of dollars building more and more infrastructure. The L&H telephony company will also sell its customer care and call center solutions and directory services. á
