Motorola, Lexicus Division Wins COMDEX Award for Chinese Speech Recognition; BYTE Magazine Honors Motorola Scientists
PALO ALTO, Calif. — December 10, 1996 — The Lexicus Division of Motorola (NYSE:MOT) announced that its continuous Chinese speech recognition technology won BYTE Magazine's award for Best Technology at COMDEX — the computer industry's largest trade show.
Jerry Pournelle, senior contributing editor at BYTE Magazine said at the award ceremony, "A quarter of the Earth's population speak Chinese, and there is no easy way to set Chinese into print. This technology promises to make life easier for a lot of people. It's also applicable to many other ideographic languages."
Thousands of new products and technologies are announced at COMDEX every year heightening the competition for the coveted BYTE awards. Other finalists in the category for Best Technology were Microsoft's CE operating system for portable devices and the emerging Digital Video Disk storage standard by Philips, Sony, Hitatchi, Time Warner, Toshiba and Pioneer. This award is the second BYTE award for Lexicus. Last year Lexicus was a BYTE finalist in the category Best Input Method with its WisdomPen Chinese Handwriting Recognition Software.
"Motorola scientists and engineers in China and the United States contributed to the development of this breakthrough technology." said Elton Sherwin, Lexicus vice president.
Continuous English speech recognition has been the Holy Grail of many American research organizations. "Chinese speech recognition is more difficult than English speech recognition," said Dr. Ronjon Nag, general manager and co-founder of the Lexicus Division of Motorola. "Our breakthrough in continuous Chinese speech recognition demonstrates Motorola leadership in developing Chinese-centric technologies."
Critical Points of Competitive Difference Several large vocabulary speech recognition technologies have emerged in the last few years. These systems have been discrete systems requiring the user to pause between words. This is difficult in Chinese because written Chinese has no spaces and word boundaries are ambiguous. Motorola's algorithm appears to be unique in its ability to recognize continuous, large vocabulary Chinese speech in real-time on an industry standard PC.
Lexicus The Lexicus Division of Motorola is one of the world's leading providers of handwriting and speech recognition software for desktop, mobile and embedded systems. For more information on Lexicus, please visit: www.mot.com/lexicus/
Note to Editors: Motorola is a registered trademark of Motorola. All other company and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.
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