ART Advanced Recognition Technologies, a global leader in voice control solutions for mobile devices, announced today that LG Electronics has selected the smARTspeak® XGT embedded speech interface from ART for its new 4500 series CDMA phones. The Korean electronics and communications company is the world's largest producer of CDMA phones.

"The demand for advanced technology cell phones is growing steadily," said Eran Aharonson, CEO of ART, "and LG Electronics has earned its reputation for meeting that demand with the most innovative devices available. We believe that speaker-independent voice control with voice confirmation promises to change the cell phone landscape in the next few years and we are delighted that LG has studied the state of the art and chosen smARTspeak XGT for use in its new CDMA phone."

The new smARTspeak XGT features the industry's most advanced name-dialing technology for wireless phones and mobile devices. It is the latest version of the company's smARTspeak line, which introduced the industry's first speaker-independent name-dialing technology. The smARTspeak XGT is fully speaker independent, meaning it can be operated by any user with no voice training of the device. It also adds a new voice feedback capability that gives users audio confirmation of spoken names, numbers, and other commands. This is done by "reading" from the phone's 500-name contact list using advanced text-to-speech technology.


LG 4500 Will Become the New Standard for Voice-Enabled Phones

"LG's global strategy is to integrate the best technological innovations into our products," said Mr. Jae-Gyung Ham, vice president of CDMA Marketing at LG. "Having successfully deployed smARTspeak into earlier CDMA and GSM devices, we are extremely impressed with its phoneme-based speech recognition and text-to-speech verbal confirmation. We have every confidence that the new LG 4500 with smARTspeak XGT will soon become the benchmark against which all other mobile devices are measured."

The advanced features of the smARTspeak XGT will enable users of the LG 4500 phone to dial by speaking a person's name or phone number. Giving equally fast and accurate response whether users say "John Smith, office" or "Dial +1202111002", smARTspeak XGT maintains ART's popular out of-the-box, multi-user experience. In addition, the phone will recognize commands such as "contact" and "redial" and offers trainable digit dialing that can be adjusted to a user's accent. When more than one name is available, ART's "Best Match" function presents a short-list of options either as text or voice for extra convenience.

ART's voice technology also makes the new LG 4500 one of the safest mobile phones available. By enabling total phone operation by voice, smARTspeak XGT is ideal for in-car use. When combined with a built-in speakerphone, such as on the LG 4500, it offers a hands-free mode for improved driving safety without the need or expense of a special car kit.

The new LG 4500 CDMA phones are currently available only in the United States.