02/23/19 BABEL MOVES TO BELGIUM (int'l edition)

Return to main story

BABEL MOVES TO BELGIUM (int'l edition)
European speech technology is world class
In the flat farm country and cow pastures of southern Belgium, bulldozers are busy forming the foundation for an entire town. Its shape, seen from the air, is that of a human ear. That's by design. This is Flanders Language Valley, a $500 million high-tech village focused on developing software that can bridge the gap between humans and machines--programs that recognize speech and even speak. The idea is to create an entire Silicon Valley-like industry, with some 4,000 employees, in an economically depressed part of Belgium. Companies that set up in FLV will gain access to government-subsidized facilities and venture capital, a new software university, and research labs.
At the center of the project is Belgium's speech-recognition titan and chief promoter of the new town, Lernout & Hauspie. FLV received a huge boost in September, when Microsoft Corp. invested $40 million for an 8% stake in L&H and dropped $3 million into FLV Management, a venture-capital fund. While the numbers weren't large, the Microsoft support helped validate the notion of a European mecca for speech technologies. ''It's our most critical R&D partnership,'' says Microsoft Chief William H. Gates III. Belgian banks and insurers have rushed to invest in the venture-capital fund, which tripled in size in six months, to $45 million.
Belgium isn't the only European hotbed of language technology. Across the Continent, laboratories at industrial giants and university startups are alive with machines learning to converse in a veritable babel of languages. It's no surprise. Europe's language diversity spurs the development of translation programs, and its leadership in digital telephony provides a platform for countless computer-phone applications.
FAST TALK. In Vienna, Philips Electronics is perfecting a German-language program to understand questions and dispatch railroad information over the phone. Researchers at Daimler Benz are developing a high-tech auto dashboard that responds to verbal commands--say, ''turn up the heat''--in a variety of languages. And scientists at Britain's Cambridge University have come out on top in the last five U.S. Defense Dept. evaluations in speech recognition.
In the race to the marketplace, though, Belgium's L&H, with revenues of $99.2 million, outpaces its rivals. Through acquisitions, such as those of speech-technology pioneer Kurweil Applied Intelligence Inc. and Mendez Language & Technology, the company has amassed a broad range of basic speech technologies that listen, transcribe, speak, and translate. ''L&H's advantage is they come at it from a variety of different angles,'' says Coleen Kaiser, an analyst with BA Robertson Stephens International Ltd. in London.
Indeed, while competitors often take their time to hone single products, L&H rushes them to market. All told, the company sells 108 hardware and software products. With Microsoft, L&H is working to develop speech programs to negotiate the popular Office suite or new AutoPC car-navigation system. And L&H is launching a text-translation program for the Internet and a $100 mass-market dictation program. Called Voice Express, it can transcribe spoken words and obey spoken commands.
Not all of the technology is ready for prime time, though. Take the Internet translator due later this year. In a recent German-to-English demonstration, the result was a primitive English, with tortured syntax and some untranslated words, others nonsensical. Still, argues CEO Gaston Bastiaens, the machine translation gives the user the gist of a document. ''We're trying to get an average of 85% recognition,'' Bastiaens says.
Some of the slickest voice- recognition technology comes out of laboratories at Cambridge University and its spin-off, Entropic Group. Founded in 1995, Entropic sells several voice programs, including a transcriber and a kit for developing interactive dialogue. That has helped it land contracts from Lucent Technologies Inc., the U.S. Defense Dept., and Harvard University.
Despite Entropic's progress, some of its leading products remain an embarrassing step or two from the marketplace. In a recent demonstration of how interactive dialogue could be used to request movie tickets, the program confused Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho with Mission: Impossible.
Clearly, there's loads of work ahead, and the Europeans are likely to be in the thick of it. The question now is whether the Belgians and their new partners from Redmond, Wash., can create the buzz in the giant ear now rising in the fields of Flanders.
By Stephen Baker in Brussels, with Julia Flynn in Cambridge, England

Return to main story