“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 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.”
“n 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.”
“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. …
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.