Lernout & Hauspie
Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products, or L&H, was a Belgium-based
speech recognition technology leader
company, which was founded by Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie, and which went
bankrupt in 2001. The company was based in Ypres, Flanders, in what was then called the
History
L&H was founded in 1987 by Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie. After a difficult start, it quickly
grew, and, in 1995, it went public on the Nasdaq (LHSP) and was
also quoted on the Easdaq. Its headquarters were in Ypres,
Belgium, and in
Flanders played an important role in helping and investing in the company and the surrounding Flanders Language Valley. L&H quickly became Flanders' pride.
It acquired a number of its smaller competitors, including text-to-speech developer Berkeley Speech Technologies, in the late 1990s. In March/April 2000 L&H acquired Dictaphone for nearly $1 billion, then acquired Dragon Systems shortly after. Lernout & Hauspie provided the voice recognition technology needed to propel Dictaphone's voice recognition enhanced transcription system.
For some time L&H was dogged by rumours of financial impropriety, and in early 1999 the Wall Street Journal, in its 'Heard on the Street' column ran allegations by Goldman Sachs analyst Robert Smithson that earnings had been over-stated. Further investigation by Wall Street Journal staffer Jesse Eisinger led to the revelation on August 8, 2000 of a major financial scandal involving fictitious transactions in Korea and improper accounting methodologies elsewhere. In April 2001 founders Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie as well as former CEO Gaston Bastiaens were arrested in what is considered one of the largest corporate scandals in history prior to Enron. L&H finally went bankrupt on 25 October 2001 after having struggled for a year.
The technology was bought by Nuance Communications (known then as ScanSoft) and Vantage Learning after the bankruptcy. Nuance acquired all of the speech technologies and Vantage acquired all of the proofing, spelling, and linguistic search technologies.
Many people, especially in West Flanders, were blinded by the company's success and lost large sums of money on L&H stock.
The Flanders regional government became a major L&H investor through a
See also
External links
- http://www.lhs.com, one of their old websites, now leading to Nuance's website, also archived on the Internet Archives.
- http://www.lhsl.com, another of their old websites, now leading to Nuance's website
- "How High-Tech Dream Shattered in Scandal at Lernout & Hauspie", an article from the WSJ (December 7, 2000) (last cached on Apr 20 2006 in Internet Archives)
- Vantage Technologiesvls:Lernout en Hauspie
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