Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products NV, looking to strengthen its position in the linguistic technologies at the core of speech recognition, has struck deals with Inso Corp and Novell Inc. L&H will purchase electronic publishing firm Inso Corp’s Linguistic Software business unit and has entered into a cooperative agreement with Novell to acquire research and development manpower. The added resources will help L&H expand and refine its Natural Language Technology, which is employed in all of its speech and language offerings. NLT is next-generation speech technology with added intelligence that enables computers and electronic devices to understand and respond to more complex dialogues than the older discreet speech models. L&H says NLT is applicable to technology and product development company-wide. The Inso acquisition will cost L&H roughly $19.5m – $9.75m in cash and $9.75m in shares of Lernout & Hauspie common stock. The package includes all of Inso’s linguistic software products, including its proofing tools, reference works and information management tools, the Quest database search technology, and all customer and supplier agreements related to those products. The Quest development product was of particular interest to L&H, as it figures it is integral to the company’s internet translation service, currently under development, as well as some of its dictation products. L&H also gains approximately 20 linguists and engineers. Revenue from Inso’s linguistic activities for 1997 were approximately $13m with profits of more than $3.3m. Its customers include Digital Equipment Corp, Adobe Systems Inc, and IBM Corp’s Lotus unit. The acquisition is expected to close within four to six weeks. The Novell deal will see L&H acquire about 25 linguists, software engineers and computational linguists from Novell’s Advanced Technology Division and put them into L&H’s linguistic engineering staff which before these two deals stood at about 600. There’s no money changing hands up front, save the assumption of the engineers’ salaries, and Novell will see a percentage of the sales of new products that contains Novell technology. The Novell agreement also means that the two will give the 10 million-strong user base of Novell’s GroupWise access to L&H’s machine translation technology which is being developed to provide users with translation of text in a variety of languages.
