L&H THRIVES ON MULTILINGUAL ROOTS
Leading speech recognition software maker Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products
NV http://www.lhs.com/ is located in the heart of a region known as "Language
Valley," aptly named for an area in Belgium, which is surrounded by France,
the Netherlands and German. The country has three official languages --
French, Dutch and German -- and English is also widely spoken. "They have a
much more global outlook than their competitors," says the head of a software
consulting firm. "The world doesn't speak just one language." L&H, which
focuses on both speech and language translation businesses, is releasing its
Voice Express Pro next month -- a product that enables users to give verbal
commands and dictate documents to a computer -- and another product,
code-named Popeye, will let software developers add voice recognition to
e-mail programs. L&H is also working on a product called iTranslator, which
will translate Web pages from one language to another and allow users to do
multilingual Web searches. Initially, the intended market will be non-English
speakers, but that's going to change. "...In four to six years, there will be
more Web sites in Chinese than in English," says the company's CEO. 
(Investor's Business Daily 26 Aug 98)