Motorola, Lexicus Division

Lexicus Corporation was founded in 1992 in Palo Alto, California, by Ronjon Nag and Chris Kortge to develop natural handwriting recognition software for pen-based computers.¹ At AT&T Microelectronics' COMDEX/Fall '92 announcement of industry support for the Hobbit microprocessor and GO Corporation's PenPoint operating system, Lexicus committed to delivering its Longhand natural cursive handwriting recognition software on the Hobbit/PenPoint platform.²

Motorola acquired Lexicus on November 11, 1993, making the privately held company a wholly owned subsidiary within Motorola's Paging and Wireless Data Group, with Nag continuing as president.¹ At the time of the acquisition, Longhand was already shipping for PenPoint and Microsoft Windows pen-based operating systems, and Motorola identified the software as a key element of its personal communicator product program.¹

The first major release under Motorola ownership came on December 30, 1994, when Lexicus Corp. shipped the developer version of Lexicus Longhand for Microsoft's Windows for Pen Computing at $149, built around a 25,000-word dictionary, customizable user dictionaries, and a writer-independent neural-network recognizer that handled cursive, print, and mixed styles at twelve characters per second.³ In July 1995 the division, now part of Motorola's Messaging, Information and Media Sector, introduced Lexicus QuickPrint, a $79 handwriting recognition package for General Magic's Magic Cap platform that ran on the Motorola Envoy Wireless Communicator and the Sony Magic Link.⁴ Two months later Lexicus ported QuickPrint to Motorola's M68328 "DragonBall" microprocessor with a memory footprint of less than 20K, targeting low-power, low-cost consumer devices without keyboards.⁵ In November 1995 the division released Lexicus Longhand Professional, adding artificial-intelligence vocabulary learning, alternate-word choices in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, macro expansion of handwritten acronyms into full text, and deferred recognition for pen note-taking.⁶

At the same COMDEX/Fall '95 show, Motorola Lexicus announced what it described as the world's first highly accurate cursive Chinese character recognizer, capable of recognizing the full 13,000-character set of Traditional and Simplified Chinese with over 95 percent accuracy in real usage and no user training required.⁷ The recognizer, marketed as WisdomPen and developed by a team led by Dr. Kannan Parthasarathy, was named a finalist for the 1996 DISCOVER Magazine Award for Technological Innovation.⁸ WisdomPen technology reached the Taiwanese market in August 1996 through a licensing agreement with digitizing-tablet maker YTG for its SmartPad Professional product,⁹ and in November 1996 the bundled WisdomPen Chinese Handwriting Recognition System was signed to Acer Sertek for distribution in Taiwan at an estimated retail price of NT$4,990.¹⁰

Lexicus extended into speech recognition in September 1996 with CrystalTalk, a small-vocabulary, noise-robust speaker-dependent recognizer ported to Advanced RISC Machines' ARM processor family and demonstrated at 99.8 percent accuracy in quiet office environments and 96 percent in high-noise conditions.¹¹ At COMDEX/Fall '96 the division announced a breakthrough in continuous Chinese speech recognition, a real-time, large-vocabulary system that recognized over 10,000 spoken Chinese words running on a standard PC,¹² and the following month BYTE Magazine named the technology Best Technology at COMDEX, the division's second BYTE award after WisdomPen's 1995 Best Input Method finalist citation.¹³ WisdomPen reached the People's Republic of China in February 1997 through Beijing Tsinghua Wintone and Shenzhen Liming at an estimated retail price of RMB1,680,¹⁴ and the United States and Canada the next day through TwinBridge Software Corp. at an introductory $168.¹⁵ In March 1998 Lexicus signed a broad licensing agreement with Lernout & Hauspie to incorporate L&H's automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech, and speech and music compression technologies into its own product line,¹⁶ and the relationship was extended in June 1998 with a return license giving L&H access to Lexicus's Chinese speech components for building Chinese dictation engines.¹⁷

In September 1998 Motorola folded Lexicus into its newly formed Internet and Networking Group, citing the division's speech and handwriting recognition as central to the group's vision of personal networking across PDAs, mobile phones, and pagers.¹⁸ DragonPen, a Traditional Chinese handwriting recognizer for the 3Com Palm Connected Organizer derived from WisdomPen and capable of recognizing more than 5,000 characters in under a second, shipped that December through Hong Kong distributor Synergy Technology Distribution Limited at US$27.99 for download.¹⁹ By June 1999, under general manager Steven Nowlan and as part of Motorola's newly formed Personal Networking Group, Lexicus's WisdomPen Lite recognizer shipped on the MobilePad 800, a Chinese-market wireless personal data communicator with input for more than 6,000 handwritten Simplified Chinese characters.²⁰ In October 1999 the division launched its iTAP intelligent-keypad text-entry system on Phone.com's UP.Browser micro-browser, extending text-entry support to WAP-enabled mass-market handsets including Motorola's tri-band Timeport L7089 GSM phone.²¹ In February 2000, under new general manager Craig Peddie, Lexicus debuted an Input Technologies Suite combining iTAP, natural handwriting, and speech recognition on Symbian's EPOC operating system at the Symbian Developers Conference in Santa Clara.²² In May 2001 the division released iSKETCH, a digital-ink compression and encryption technology that let Palm OS users send handwritten notes, sketches, and signatures between mobile devices and was made available for download at Palmgear.com and Handango.com.²³

AI generated using primary sources referenced in the footnotes