Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products NV, Belgium, says that the award of a new European patent takes it closer to artificial intelligence. Founder Gaston Bastiaens claims it brings forward the prospect of having open dialogue with your computer. The patent, which has already been granted in the US, determines the ratio between acoustic recognition and statistical recognition. When its software compares spoken input against hundreds of possible word sequences, it picks the sequence with the best recognition score. This depends on two elements; the acoustic match and the statistical likelihood of this word sequence being spoken. The patent covers the weighting of the two elements in the recognition score.
