Following a trail of recent acquisitions Belgian company Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products NV is to purchase the Text-To-Speech TruVoice technology and business of Centigram Communications Corp. The company will integrate the TruVoice software, which analyses inputted text and coverts it to natural sounding text, into its existing family of TTS technologies and applications in a bid to further expand its presence in the speech product arena. Lernout & Hauspie acquisitions this year include Kurzweil Applied Intelligence Inc (CI No 3,1,41) for which it paid $53m, and GMS Gesellschaftfuer Multilinguale System GmbH (CI No 3,170) which cost $14.7m. TruVoice will support several languages and Lernout & Hauspie says it will complement its existing TTS product lines aimed at the computer, multimedia, automotive and consumer electronics markets. Full terms of the agreement have not been disclosed, but it is understood it will include the issuance of some 200,000 shares of Lernout & Hauspie common stock, valued at around $5m.
