Sailing to a technology port near you

Acronyms aren't always easy to recall, but here's one that governments in particular should find memorable, since it comes with a US$10 million freebie.

The acronym is SAIL, and it stands for Speech, Artificial Intelligence and Language technology. A non-- profit organization called the SAIL Trust (www.flvfund.com), based in Ypres, Belgium, will donate US$10 million - if a government matches it - towards the creation of that country's own speech and language technology incubation centre.

Already, Norway and Singapore have taken the SAIL Trust up on its offer. So three such incubation "ports" now exist, with more on the way. SAIL Port Northern Europe in Norway and SAIL Port Asia Pacific in Singapore, together with the original SAIL Port Flanders Valley in Belgium, now house more than 40 speech technology firms.

"That combined US$20 million put into a SAIL Port is enough to get it started and running for five to seven years," says Peter Demuynck, vice-president of business development for SAIL Trust. "We don't take any equity in any of the SAIL Port companies. But we do take warrants which we execute (cash in) once a company has attracted venture capital. That way, the SAIL Port is self-- sustaining."

In return for this income, Sail Port administrators and technical experts help resident companies speed up the process of getting their speech technologies to market.

While arrangements with partner governments are flexible, Demuynck says in Norway, the government owns the land and the SAIL Port buildings. It charges SAIL Port residents fair market rents and should recoup its investment within seven years.

Elsewhere, a SAIL Port Middle East in Israel is under development. SAIL Trust officials are also dealing with hopeful hosts of SAIL Ports in Hungary, Japan, South America, Africa, and the U.S.

And it's not just the US$10 million carrot that's attracting them. It's the potential markets. Take just speech recognition technology, for example. The research firm Dataquest estimates that the world speech recognition market will grow from just under US$300 million in 1999 to nearly US$1 billion in 2002 - as manufacturers of everything from cars to home security systems build in systems that will recognize their master's voice. Add to that, the burgeoning markets for machine translation, which automatically translates with 80 per cent accuracy; and text-to-speech synthesis, which enables computers to talk to their visually impaired or otherwise busy users; and speech compression, which makes legislative, courtroom, and medical record-keeping immensely more efficient.

Finally, there is the market for speech-driven artificial intelligence built into search engines. It enables you to verbally ask your computer: When did Napoleon fight the battle of Waterloo? and not give you back all you didn't need to know about Napoleon or about Waterloo but the actual date. In all, it's estimated the world market for speech and language technologies will reach US$8 billion by 2003.

So far, Canada's absence from this Belgium-based initiative seems conspicuous, especially given our common heritage.

Not only are the Battle of Ypres and Flanders (where poppies grow) redolent in both Canadian and Belgian history, but we have experienced the same struggle to hold a two-language country together. So we share an inherent interest in improving understanding through speech technology.

Our only connections on this score with Belgium so far are the transcription services at both the House of Commons and the Senate in Ottawa. They run on speech compression technology supplied by BCB Voice Systems in Markham, Ont. BCB has attracted investment from the Flanders Valley Trust, the forerunner of SAIL Trust.

So, isn't it time we truly set sail?

By Andy Shaw

Andy Shaw is a contributing editor to Technology in Government. Please contact him at [email protected].

Copyright Plesman Publications Ltd. Mar 2000
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