Applied Language Technologies Inc, a Boston, Massachusetts-based speech recognition spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the latest firm to announce an investment from Intel Corp. ALTech, which got the equity investment as part of a new round of financing, says it plans to work with Intel to further optimize its SpeechWorks software for IA-32 and IA-64 architecture processors. Its products, which aim to enable people to talk to computers over the telephone in a natural way, already ship on Intel servers. Intel now has an investment portfolio with an estimated value of around $750m, and has spent around $300m of that amount over the last year. It made about 100 investments during 1997, and this year could make even more.
