By Brian White
Microsoft Corp has ditched plans to incorporate Lernout & Hauspie’s voice recognition technology into Windows and instead is pressing ahead with its own product code-named Whisper. The move signals Redmond’s growing ambitions in voice technology and threatens all the other players such as IBM Corp and Dragon Systems Inc. There are echoes of the way Microsoft tried to destroy Netscape’s market share by bundling its own browser with Windows. Microsoft holds an 8% stake in L&H, and Bernard Vergnes, Microsoft’s European head, said in 1998 the US software giant plans to incorporate L&H’s speech recognition technology into Windows within the next three to five years (CI No 3413). However, since January 1993, Microsoft has had a team developing adapting a university-developed speech engine Sphinx-II into the Windows Highly Intelligent Speech Recognizer – Whisper. A version with a 1,000 word vocabulary will run on a 486 with 4MB of memory and a standard soundcard for command and control applications. Microsoft refused to be drawn on when Whisper will be incorporated into Windows 2000. Version 4.0 of Speech Application Programming Interface (SAPI) software developers kit is available for download from Microsoft’s web site and a spokesperson said that version 5.0 will be released in the next six months. The threat from Microsoft has been recognized in the current IPO document from Dragon which gives potential investors a blunt warning. If Microsoft bundles Whisper with Windows and is successful in influencing independent software developers to use Whisper when speech-enabling their software applications, Dragon says future financial results will be materially and adversely affected. Dragon also claims that Microsoft has made its latest release of SAPI more restrictive to competitors’ speech recognition technologies. As an example, it says that SAPI requires the use of a mouse to correct errors, rendering useless their own voice-based error correction capabilities. Lernout & Hauspie professes to be unworried by Microsoft’s move. Chief executive officer, Gaston Bastiaens said they had a good relationship and would never comment on Microsoft’s product plans. L&H has been moving away from the low-end applications that Microsoft has developed, rapidly adding a large number of languages and has produced specialist applications for vertical markets such as the law and medical sectors. Bastiaens said that even if Microsoft shipped Whisper with Windows, L&H software would still have a place sitting on top of Windows. While L&H oozes confidence that the superiority of its technology makes it immune to a Redmond onslaught, other companies have more cause to worry. For its part, Microsoft would not be drawn on whether Whisper would be developed into a full-scale application for uses such as dictation. Microsoft has always shared the vision that speech will be the natural replacement for the keyboard and mouse.
