Voice Recognition Breaking News

LERNOUT & HAUSPIE SPEECH PRODUCTS DELIVERS CUSTOMIZED TEXT-TO-SPEECH ENGINES FOR BLUE-SILICON'S B3 MESSAGING SERVICE

Customized L&H™ RealSpeak™ Technology Provides Unique, Breakthrough Multi-Language Offering

IEPER, BELGIUM & BURLINGTON, Mass. -- September 4, 2001 -- Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products NV (OTC: LHSPQ) ('L&H' or 'the Company'), a world leader in speech and language technologies, products and services, today announced that its Speech and Language Technologies Division (SLT) has delivered customized versions of L&H™ RealSpeak™ to blue-silicon, a leading provider of extended enterprise messaging and unified multimedia messaging services. blue-silicon will integrate the high-quality, natural-sounding L&H™ RealSpeak™ text-to-speech technology in its b3 messaging service.

Leveraging L&H's award-winning RealSpeak™ technology, blue-silicon will offer business people around the world the convenience of listening to and deleting their email messages while away from their computers. For users who speak Mandarin Chinese, this enhancement to the b3 messaging service will also allow them to listen to individual messages that contain HTML text written in both English and Mandarin Chinese, read aloud by the same voice. This customized feature was developed by L&H to help users better understand messages that are read aloud and to create a superior user experience.

"L&H RealSpeak provides blue-silicon with advanced text-to-speech technology that will enhance its customers' ability to conduct global business from virtually any location around the world 24 hours a day," said John Shagoury, president of L&H's SLT division. "The customized features developed for Mandarin-speaking users of blue-silicon's services are recent technology breakthroughs that demonstrate our commitment to offering our customers cutting-edge technologies with which to improve their products and services."

"The fastest way to successfully go to market with new products or product enhancements is to work with best-of-breed partners. To satisfy the growing needs of our global and ever-expanding client base, we call on partners like L&H," said Robert Pendergrast, vice president of business development for blue-silicon. "L&H was the only vendor that was capable of tailoring a text-to-speech engine to meet the multi-lingual needs of Mandarin-speaking customers who use our b3 messaging service."

About Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products

L&H is a global leader in advanced speech and language solutions. L&H 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 provides a wide range of offerings, including customized solutions for corporations; core speech technologies marketed to OEMs; end user applications for continuous speech products; and document creation, human and machine translation services, Internet translation offerings, and linguistic tools. L&H's products and services originate in the following 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.lhsl.com.

About blue-silicon

blue-silicon is the leading provider of Extended Enterprise Messaging (EEM) and Unified Multimedia Messaging (UMM) to businesses around the world. Combining voicemail, fax, wireless and e-mail messaging, blue-silicon's mid-sourced ASP solution extends the reach of service providers, integrating with existing e-mail infrastructure, Centrex and more than 90 types of corporate PBX systems. Established in 1997 and venture-backed, blue-silicon is headquartered in San Jose, California with Points of Presence (POPs) in over 100 cities around the world. For further information on blue-silicon, visit www.blue-silicon.com.