Posted at 4:55 PM PT, Apr 5, 1999
Intel believes that language recognition technology has great possibilities for the future, and is offering $30 million to make it happen. The chip giant on Monday signed a letter of intent to invest $30 million in Lernout & Hauspie (L&H), a company whose expertise lies in natural language understanding, intelligent content management, and information mining of unstructured data.

Officials at both companies indicated that the goal of the venture is to combine L&H's linguistic technology with Intel's architecture to provide structured access to the mass of unstructured information that currently exists.

Under the agreement Intel will acquire non-voting securities that would eventually be convertible into common stock of L&H. The deal, which will not be final until the companies finalize details and receive regulatory approval, will be made by a subsidiary of Intel. In the meantime, L&H will continue to develop its portfolio of voice, language, and information technologies.

Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V., in Burlington, Mass., can be reached at www.lhs.com. Intel Corp., in Santa Clara, Calif., can be reached at www.intel.com.

Michael Lattig is an InfoWorld reporter.