Singapore-based Creative Technology Ltd, most famous for its SoundBlaster audio board, is making a pitch at the vision side of multimedia. It has licensed Intel Corp’s Indeo video compression technology and will incorporate the Intel 80750 video processor into a series of video boards. Apart from anything else Creative intends to enter the personal computer-based video conferencing market: its president and chief executive K S Chay told Reuter that, combined with Creative’s own technology, Indeo would enable iAPX-86 personal computer users to hold video conferences using ordinary telephone lines. The company is due to begin marketing an initial batch of new video products using Indeo in the first quarter next year with the multimedia conferencing systems launched later. Chay said that the video-conferencing boards will cost less than $1,000 and plug into 80486 and Pentium-based machines. Meanwhile Borland International Inc has struck a deal with Creative to add speech recognition hooks to the new version of the Borland C++ development environment. The new CD-ROM version of C++ 4.0 will incorporate an application programming interface for Creative Voice Assist, single utterance recognition software that enables Windows users to rest their mouse fingers in favour of their tongues. Developers will also get the sample run-time version of the program. Voice Assist can handle a user-defined vocabulary of over 30,000 words.
