The demonstration centred on L&H's new NAK handheld device, which the firm said should ship before the end of the year.
The device, which was also shown at CeBit, is built around the Linux operating system and uses a StrongArm CPU. L&H said that the device has a large vocabulary and can recognise speech without prior training Ã,Ã,Â-- a capability called speaker independence.
However, L&H would not disclose how much RAM or Flash ROM is used in the device -- both factors that will affect the price of finished products. For example, speech recognition systems for desktop PCs typically consume in excess of 20MB of storage space.
In addition to the speech recognition engine, the device includes L&H's RealSpeak text-to-speech engine. The firm demonstrated how users could listen to the device read out an email, then use the speech recognition engine to create a reply. As well as automatically transcribing the contents of email, the software allows the handheld device to be controlled using spoken commands. Users will be able to use voice to interact with Web sites, L&H said.
L&H also demonstrated iTranslator Enterprise, its client/server translation tool that uses a Web browser as its client device. L&H said that it is suitable for international companies that need basic translations of electronic documents. The software accepts Ascii, RTF and HTML files. Many analysts say that the absence of support for somefile formats, notably Microsoft Word, is evidence of an industry-wide move away from formats that can harbour macro viruses.
The software also provides a good foundation on which to build new applications. In a move that highlights one such application of this technology, L&H has made a demonstration version available to users of Palm VII handheld devices.
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