Sweet talking in the war of words

Belgian voice technology company Lernout & Hauspie demonstrated speech applications at Comdex last week, including a pager able to receive voice messages over standard alphanumeric paging networks.

Also demonstrated at the show was VoiceXpress, Lernout & Hauspie's first entry into the emerging market for continuous dictation.

The company - in which Microsoft holds an eight per cent stake - also announced Madison, a text-to-speech toolbar for Windows 95, and demonstrated its real-time translation technology for the Web.

VoiceXpress combines developed continuous dictation technology with the existing Voice Commands product from the company's subsidiary Kurzweil.

This system allows for wordprocessor commands, such as increasing the font size, to be delivered through a headpiece.

Gaston Bastiaens, CEO of Lernout & Hauspie, claimed that dictation is too narrow a term for VoiceXpress, referring to it as 'document creation'.

VoiceXpress is expected to reach the market early next year. Although competing products from Dragon and IBM are already on sale, the company claims that the integration of natural language command processing puts its product ahead of the field. It requires a Pentium 200 with at least 32Mb of Ram.

VoiceXpress will be shipped in a number of forms, with variations to deal with specialist applications such as medical vocabulary. There will be two main products - the basic setup and the more advanced VoiceXpress Plus. The latter is specifically tailored to work alongside Microsoft Word. The basic product will cost less than $100.