L&H announce new Singaporean partnerships

by Samuel Quek

Partners will deploy speech and language technologies, extend reach to customers

Singapore, 4 April 2000 - Lernout and Hauspie today announced a list of new Singaporean partners under its Speech, Artificial Intelligence, Language (SAIL) Partners program.

Several of the partners demonstrated how their products/services would be enhanced by L&H technologies.

The partners, consisting of portals, startups, dot-coms and new media vary in their styles, but are all consistant in their reliance on IT:

• earth9.com will be using L&H's automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) technologies to speech-enable their site. L&H will also provide computerized translation and localization services to reach Japan, and Chinese audiences in Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan.

• iDesk Pte Ltd provides e-commerce infrastructures allowing integration between offline and online business processes. L&H TTS will be used together with existing solutions.

• Mustard Technology Pte Ltd has developed a human-like, intuitive search engine that allows users to search without knowing the exact spelling, pronunciation or hierarchy locality. Mustard and L&H are expecting to jointly develop voice-eneabled directory services and search engines.

• WAPworkz aims to allow users to access to web sites via WAP-enabled mobile phones, and also provides applications, and solutions. The Singaporean start-up today demonstrated accessing L&H translation services as well as a set of lecture notes posted online, via a mobile phone.

• Worldmine, which provides surfers with a online travel guide and hotel reviewing service, will be using L&H services to cater for translation and localization to multiple languages - including Chinese, Korean, French, German etc. The web site will be using machine translation software to translate the content.

"Non-english speaking Internet users number about 43% of the world's total," said Louis Woo, president and general manager of L&H Asia Pacific. "This fact, when combined with analysts' predictions that the number of Internet users will be over 350 million by 2002, presents global communications challenges of unprecedented proportion."

L&H's SAIL Partner program, first launched in January of this year, is an end-to-end partnership program aimed at helping partners bring new products to market.

About Lernout & Hauspie
Lernout & Hauspie is a provider of advanced speech and language solutions for vertical markets, computers, automobiles, telecommunications, embedded products, consumer goods and the Internet.

L&H's products and services originate in four basic areas: automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS), digital speech and music compression (SMC), and text-to-text (translation).