Lernout & Hauspie Announces Letter of Intent for Intel to Invest $30M
6 April 1999
Lernout & Hauspie Announces Letter of Intent for Intel to Invest $30 Million
IEPER, Belgium & BURLINGTON, Mass.--April 5, 1999--Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products (L&H)(TM) today announced that Intel Corporation has signed a binding letter of intent to invest $30 million in L&H. The proposed investment, which would be made through a subsidiary, is subject to Intel's satisfactory completion of due diligence, completion and execution of documentation acceptable to both parties and regulatory approval. According to the terms of the letter, Intel would initially acquire non-voting securities convertible into common stock of L&H. Intel and L&H are also discussing possible activities that employ L&H's expertise in Natural Language Understanding (NLU), intelligent content management (ICM) information mining of unstructured data, and machine translation, among other areas."L&H will continue to develop its portfolio of voice, language and information technologies, including NLU, ICM and other data structuring and querying methods." said Gaston Bastiaens, president and CEO of L&H. "Solutions using our technologies for the Internet and e-commerce are a logical place for us to expand our market segment position."
"Voice and language technologies will help enable a new level of natural interaction with data and computers," said Ron Whittier, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Content Group. "We are excited about new benefits that technologies such as those from L&H -- combined with high performance Intel architecture-based computers -- can bring to end users."
"L&H is broadening the areas in which it applies its core strengths and expertise in linguistic technology to enable structured access to formerly unstructured data," said Jo Lernout, co-founder of L&H. "I believe that running our Natural Language Technology on faster microprocessors will simplify querying and data mining for the Internet and e-commerce market segments."
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. The company provides a wide range of offerings, including: customized solutions for corporations; core speech technologies marketed to OEMs; end user and retail applications for continuous speech products in horizontal and vertical markets; and document creation, human and machine translation services, Internet translation offerings, and linguistic tools.
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, including statements regarding L&H's expectations and intentions concerning investments, the development and commercialization activities of L&H, certain of its customers and the performance of their respective products and products under development. There can be no assurance that actual results will not be materially different than those anticipated in these forward-looking statements. Factors which could cause actual results to materially differ from those anticipated include known and unknown risks, including without limitation, the uncertainty of new product development, including the risk that newly introduced products may contain undetected errors or defects or otherwise not perform as anticipated, the early stage of development of the speech and language technology markets, uncertainty of market growth, rapid technological change and intense competition, as well as other risks set forth in L&H's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. L&H cautions readers not to place undue reliance upon any such forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date made. L&H expressly disclaims any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to any such statements to reflect any change in the L&H's expectations or any change in events, conditions or circumstance on which any such statement is based.
All product names and trademarks mentioned herein are trademarks of L&H or their respective owners.