Lernout & Hauspie is furthering its investment in US speech recognition software companies with an approximately $3.8m purchase of 18.7% of Speech Machines’ issued shares – which the Belgian company hopes will provide it a springboard for entry into the telecommunications market. The Belgian speech software company will work with Speech Machines on large vocabulary speech recognition over the telephone, with an eye on vertical markets. The investment will also result in Speech Machines creating what L&H is touting as a complete unified messaging system, by folding L&H’s email-reading technology, code-named Popeye, into its CyberTranscriber telephone and internet dictation service. Speech Machines work on internet dictation software should help build on the stake L&H took in June in Accent Software International Ltd, which makes email and web authoring language software applications. L&H will also use the software to add telephony dictation support to its L&H Kurzweil Clinical Reporter, which is aimed at the medical market. L&H last year acquired computer dictation company Kurzweil Applied Intelligence Inc for $53m, one of a string of technology purchases, which this year have numbered the multilingual technical publisher the Heitmann Group.
