Big Companies Jumping in Voice Technology Market
By Yun Dae-won
Wednesday, December 18, 2002
With projection of world voice technology market at $38 billion in 2003 and domestic market growing from 26 billion won last year to 100 billion this year to 2 trillion won in 2005 big companies such as Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics and KT are rushing to the market. If big companies with technology and money enter the voice technology market there will be a change in the landscape of the market.
In terms of number of patents for voice recognition and synthesizing technologies Samsung have made 44 applications from 1999 until now, LG 39 and KT 16. Their R&D momentum for technology is also accelerating materializing into commercial products.
Samsung Electronics established a HCI lab comprised of researchers in August in an effort to commercialize technologies into products. The company also is trying to focus on development of foundation technology including voice engine through Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology.
The company made its first step into the arena of voice technology commercialization by adding its own voice synthesizing technology to PDA NEXIO and smart phone. It plans to integrate its voice technology into its home appliances in the future.
LG Electronics, which has been developing voice technology at its research institute in 1988, is stepping up commercialization of voice technologies. LG Electronics Institute of Technology has 15 researchers with advanced degrees and is pursuing more patents and application of voice technologies.
LG Electronics actually provided KOSDAQ-registered VoiceWare with core voice technologies and is maintaining a close relationship with the firm as a 2nd major shareholder.
KT has been focusing on developing user interface-centered technologies at its voice recognition service development team since 1991. The research team of 7 researcher with doctoral degree developed an automatic interpretation system in 1995 and introduced VXML-based voice recognition technology in 2000.
It is recently stepping up development of multi-modal technology, so-called next-generation voice technology along with VXML-based personal voice recognition directory system.
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