Sega Enterprises Ltd’s decision to use variants of Hitachi Ltd’s Super-H RISC in the Saturn games machine – two SH-2s and an SH-1 – has done wonders for the microprocessor, so much so that the company now claims that the SH-3, which seems to be the preferred part for firms building Windows CE handhelds, with five of the first seven using it, is the world’s top-selling RISC, currently going out at over 1m a month. Ypres, Belgium-based Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products NV does not need any persuading: it is busy implementing its text-to-speech and automatic speech recognition technologies for the SH-3. Lernout’s text-to-speech product is claimed to convert written text to natural-sounding speech and will be used in applications that enable travelers to call their personal computers and have their electronic mail read to them over any phone. And the automatic speech recognition technology will be integrated into processors used in consumer electronics devices with limited keyboards.
