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LERNOUT & HAUSPIE BRINGS SPEECH TECHNOLOGY ‘ON THE ROAD’ WITH NEW MOBILE SOLUTIONS AT DEMO MOBILE SHOWL&H Voice Xpress™ Mobile Professional Combines Handheld Digital Recording Device with Speech Technology; Company Showcases Voice Control for WinCE Devices and Universal Messaging Utilizing L&H's Breakthrough RealSpeak™ TTSSAN DIEGO, CA - Demo Mobile 99 Conference, April 12, 1999 - Lernout & Hauspie (NASDAQ: LHSP; EASDAQ: LHSP) (L&H™) a worldwide market leader in speech and linguistic technologies, products and services, today unveiled several new solutions that help bring the benefits of speech technology to the rapidly growing mobile market. The company announced L&H Voice Xpress™ Mobile Professional, a bundle of its award-winning continuous speech recognition software product with the new Olympus DS-150 digital voice recorder. L&H Voice Xpress Mobile Professional enables users to conveniently dictate notes into a digital voice recorder while away from the office and later use L&H's Voice Xpress speech recognition technology to instantly transcribe recorded wave files into text. L&H also demonstrated voice-activated command and control of a Microsoft® Windows® CE device using its automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) engines, and a unified messaging system that employs L&H's breakthrough RealSpeak TTS engine. The company made its announcements and demonstrated the new solutions at the Demo Mobile conference held here in San Diego, April 11-13, 1999. The solutions demonstrated by L&H are targeted at a rapidly growing audience of "Road warriors," including executives, sales professionals, and the busy consumer, who are seeking to increase their productivity while away from the computer. "Speech technology offers benefits to a wide range of users, in many diverse applications," said Gaston Bastiaens, president and CEO of L&H. "We believe that mobile users, in particular, will realize gains such as increased productivity and ease of use by employing speech as an interface. Speech will give these users hands-free operation of a wide variety of tools, allowing them to more easily and efficiently perform tasks outside the office." "L&H's speech and language technologies give professionals an easy, convenient way to retrieve information from portable devices and telephony applications," said Amy Wohl, publisher of Amy D. Wohl's Opinions newsletter. "The rapid growth of this mobile device market, which is estimated to grow to nearly $1 billion by 2002, will be further accelerated by the emergence of intuitive interface technologies, such as L&H's speech and language software." Continuous Speech for Mobile Users The new L&H Voice Xpress™ Mobile Professional is based on its soon to be shipping L&H Voice Xpress version 4, and employs the Olympus DS-150 digital voice recorder, a lightweight (2 oz.), small-sized device that can easily be carried in a pocket and that allows up to 70 minutes of recording time. Specially designed mobile features in the product help users increase productivity by allowing them to dictate e-mails, notes, letters and other documents while they are away from their personal computer. But, unlike competitive offerings available today, L&H Voice Xpress™ Mobile Professional features sophisticated environmental adjustments that allow for accurate speech recognition even for dictation recorded in high noise environments. These features leverage L&H's expertise in speech technology for a variety acoustical environments. L&H Voice Xpress Mobile Professional includes L&H's XpressRecorder™ utility, enabling users to easily and intuitively record, listen, and edit digitally recorded wave files in any Windows environment. This utility lets users remove unwanted noise in their wave files before they are converted into text. This utility can be installed on any laptop and replace, in conjunction with a headset, the handheld mobile recorder. L&H Voice Xpress Mobile Professional also pairs users' digitally recorded wave files with transcribed text so that by simply highlighting sections of text, users can listen to their speech. This feature gives users an easier way to edit documents created away from the desktop. Unlike competitive products on the market today, L&H Voice Xpress Mobile Professional does not require users to train or customize their vocabulary for different input devices. Customization of vocabulary applies to all input devices, such as mobile handheld recorders and headset microphones. Voice Control of Hand-held Windows CE Devices Demonstrated L&H also announced and demonstrated solutions that allow users to request and receive information, using voice only, from Windows CE-based portable or hand-held devices. The demonstrations were made possible with L&H's noise-robust ASR200 word based recognizer and its TTS 3000 engine with specific support for Hitachi SH-3 and MIPS processors. L&H's demonstration illustrated how a user can employ L&H's ASR engine to "ask" a handheld device "What appointments do I have today?" The company's TTS engine then enables the device to read aloud the list of appointments from its database. Dialogue speech interfaces, such as the one demonstrated here at DEMO Mobile, are a natural fit for hand-held devices because speech can be more intuitive than screen-based icons and the miniature keyboards on most hand-held devices can be difficult to manipulate. L&H's TTS and ASR support for WinCE and Hitachi SH-3, MIPS, Intel X86 and Strong Arm processors provide developers with robust, cost-effective speech platforms to enable command and control capabilities for consumer, automotive and industrial products. For more information about these solutions, please visit L&H's Website at www.lhsl.com or call (888) 537-6688. L&H Gives Unified Messaging a Human Voice While at Demo Mobile, L&H also demonstrated how its RealSpeak™ TTS technology, combined with Onset Corporation's technology, enables messaging systems to "read" faxes through e-mails to mobile professionals over the telephone. L&H's RealSpeak technology represents a breakthrough in terms of voice quality and intelligibility by employing patented synthesis algorithms and concatenative approach to speech synthesis. Onset also uses its MetaFax technology equipped with L&H's TTS 3000 engine to transform faxes into spoken messages that can be accessed by mobile users via PCs, pagers and phones. In a demonstration, Onset's software automatically routed incoming faxes to a user as editable e-mail. L&H's RealSpeak technology then read the e-mail aloud in a natural sounding, intelligible voice. For more information about L&H's RealSpeak technology, which will be available to developers in Q2 1999, please visit L&H's Web site at www.lhsl.com or call (888) 537-6688. About Lernout & Hauspie Lernout & Hauspie (L&H) is a global leader in advanced speech and language solutions for vertical markets, computers, automobiles, telecommunications, embedded products, consumer goods and the Internet. The company is making the speech user interface (SUI) the keystone of simple, convenient interaction between humans and technology, and is using advanced translation technology to break down language barriers. 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). For more information, please visit Lernout & Hauspie on the World Wide Web at www.lhs.com or www.lhsl.com. This press release contains forward-looking information. Such statements include, without limitation but not limited to statements involving L&H's plans, objectives, expectations and intentions. There can be no assurance that actual results will not be materially different than those anticipated in these forward-looking statements. Readers are cautioned that such forward- looking statements involve risk and uncertainties, including, with limitation, the risk that the company or one or more of the companies licensees will not successfully complete the development of these products on a timely basis, if at all, that the technologies will not perform as anticipated, and the general risks associated with the intense competition and rapid technological change characteristic of the speech technology market. The forward-looking statements are also subject to risks set forth in L&H's reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The forward-looking statements contained herein speak only as of the date of this Report. L&H expressly disclaims any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to any such statement to reflect any change in L&H's expectations or any change in events, conditions or circumstances on which any such statement is based. All product names and trademarks mentioned herein are trademarks of L&H or their respective owners. # # #
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