Lernout & Hauspie
More info
- Creator
- Jo Lernout, Pol Hauspie
- Released
- 1987
- Type
- Speech recognition and synthesis
Belgian speech-technology company that became Europe's tech darling in the 1990s and turned out in 2000 to have invented much of its revenue.
Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie started the company in Ieper in 1987 and grew it through a long string of acquisitions in speech recognition, translation and text-to-speech. In 2000 L&H bought Dragon Systems, makers of NaturallySpeaking, paying in its own shares.
That same year the Wall Street Journal reported that much of its South Korean revenue came from customers who didn't exist. The stock collapsed, the company went bankrupt, and the founders were later convicted of fraud. Dragon's founders were left holding worthless paper. ScanSoft bought the technology, and later renamed itself Nuance.