In a bid to produce new revenues streams from the expected growth in e-commerce, Intel Corp has formed a joint venture with Belgian company Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products NV to develop technology that will enable voice to become the major interface with computing platforms. Intel, which has just invested $30m in L&H shares, will hold 51% of the joint venture with L&H holding the other 49%. Both companies will be represented on the board and provide staff for the operation, though Intel was tight-lipped about how many it will contribute.
While voice has long been touted as the replacement for keyboard and mouse, the software requires enormous processing power and a large memory. This will be a major constraint at a time when the big growth area will be PDAs, wireless mobile devices and embedded devices in cars and household appliances. IBM Corp is already working on embedding voice recognition on a chip with the aim of producing a voice recognition co-processor for PDAs and other embedded devices (CI No 3,597).
This is a market that Intel can hardly ignore and an official said the deal with L&H would not prevent it developing products for other companies.
For its part, an L&H official said the focus would be to develop applications for e-commerce, so customers can order goods and services by voice. Company founder Jo Lernout said: The combined technologies of L&H and Intel can make e-commerce and other applications more attractive by supporting natural speech commands, human-sounding synthesized speech, accurate machine translation and faster, simpler data query and retrieval.
