comdex: mobiles to do more than phone home - handheld distance measuring devices

Posted online at 10: 01 on November 18, 1999m. EST (1501 GMT)
By Las Vegas (IDG)--
Lernout & Hauspie (L&H)
The creator of The Voice expression series voice products announced Tuesday to improve its voice engine and agreed to develop a variety of voice
Enabling technology used on mobile phones.
L & H will deploy a new language model next year as part of its voice engine, which will, among other things, be able to eliminate fill sounds such as "aah" and "um"
"At the press conference here, an L & H representative showed the new pattern with a fill tone to pause every sentence of dictation.
"Aahs" and "ums" Do not confuse the identification engine and are not included in the e-
Mail generated by the voice engine.
Gaston basstiiaens, President and CEO of L & H, also announced support for Linux in the voice expression software development kit and local support for StrongArm embedded chips.
By supporting embedded processors, users will see the dictation function of handheld devices early next year.
"What's coming is a dictation product for mobile phones," says Bastiaens . ".
Small screens and keyboards that cannot be used will require voice for all practical purposes
According to Gerry Purdy, president of mobile insight, Mountain View, California, the user interface for handheld devices
L & H also announced an agreement with Symbian Technology to voice the international corrective spell checker and smart finder for L & H-
Search technology on Symbian platform.
At present, Symbian has reached an agreement with Motorola, Ericsson and Nokia to install its operating system on the mobile phone, and the first equipment will be available next quarter.
Ian Schwartz is an information world editor based in San Francisco.