October 1997, Volume 14, No. 10 Microsoft stakes its claim in speech recognition market

Software giant Microsoft Corp. (Redmond, Wash.; http://www.microsoft.com) has staked a huge claim in the speech recognition market by investing $45 million in Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products (Ieper, Belgium, and Burlington, Mass.; http://www.lhs.com), a supplier of advanced speech technology for commercial applications and products. The two companies have established a strategic alliance to accelerate development of the next generation of voice-enabled computing on the Microsoft Windows platform. L&H recently became a much more attractive corporate entity due to its acquisition of rival speech technology vendor Kurzweil Applied Intelligence (see ISR, June 1997). L&H is combining its efforts with those of Kurzweil AI to develop a large vocabulary, speaker-independent, continuous dictation engine. Microsoft's goal is to enable the Windows operating system to recognize and respond to spoken words, and this agreement is in support of that goal. Specifically, L&H will develop applications for currently available and future versions of Microsoft's speech application programming interface (SAPI). L&H will also continue to pursue its goal of providing the broadest range of speech technologies in multiple languages for horizontal and particularly for vertical markets such as medical and legal, and will embed speech applications into special purpose hardware devices. Microsoft will work with L&H to build upon its existing speech technology efforts driven by Microsoft Research, the company's basic research organization. The alliance is expected to accelerate development of voice-enabled computing which goes beyond today's speech dictation products. In conjunction with this new alliance, Microsoft has also announced it will invest $3 million in the Flanders Language Valley Fund (FLV), a Belgian-based international technology center dedicated to supporting companies to develop speech-based technologies and applications. Microsoft and L&H intend to form a joint venture in Europe to collect and analyze speech and linguistic data. Such data is seen as a necessary component in building future speech products.

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