SAN FRANCISCO (09/07/2000) - Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products NV (L&H) said Thursday that its speech and language technology will be making its way into a line of forthcoming customer relationship management (CRM) products from Fujitsu Ltd.
Tokyo-based Fujitsu has agreed to license L&H's speech recognition ASR1500 and text-to-speech TTS3000 products in order to speech-enable Fujitsu's BroadChannel Connector line of CRM products, which are due to be released in Japan and other parts of the world later this month. The L&H technology will support Japanese, English, German and French, L&H said in a statement.
Fujitsu will use the L&H technology to speech-enable BroadChannel Connector and automate various key functions. The system should allow users to make queries over the phone and have answers automatically returned.
Fujitsu's BroadChannel Connector takes the vendor's software development tool kits for IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems along with unified messaging services and combines these applications with customer contact software, communications and media processing products from Dialogic Corp.
The L&H products aid recognition of a caller's speech over phone lines and convert text data into intelligible speech for IVR systems and unified messaging services, the company said.
In late August, L&H announced that Gaston Bastiaens, its president and CEO, would step down to be replaced by John Duerden. Bastiaens will remain on the vendor's board. [See "L&H Chief Steps Down," Aug. 25]Lernout & Hauspie, with dual headquarters in Leper, Belgium and Burlington, Massachusetts, can be reached at +32-57-228-888 or at http://www.lhsl.com/. Fujitsu, in Tokyo, can be found online at http://www.fujitsu.co.jp/.