Singapore-based Creative Technology Ltd is looking to take its market-leading sound boards onto a higher plane, and has done a deal with Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Voice Processing Corp for the latter’s continuous, large vocabulary, speaker-independent speech recognition technology for integration into future multimedia products. Creative Technology has sealed the deal by putting up cash for the development effort and paying $2.5m for an undisclosed minority equity stake. If everything goes as planned, it may also be required to pay Voice Processing up to $4m more to fund development, and to acquire an additional equity stake. The partners expect initial products to be delivered during the second quarter of 1994, to be followed by the release of products with more advanced capabilities later in the year. Voice Processing, formed 10 years ago, offers the VPro product line of speaker-independent and speaker-dependent continuous and discrete speech recognition hardware and software. The Digital Equipment Corp DECVoice and the IBM Corp DirectTalk 6000 systems both use Voice Processing’s technology.
