Dearborn, Mich. - Visteon Corp. today announced the creation of a new subsidiary dedicated to strategic product development and production delivery of speech recognition technology for the automotive and consumer markets.

The new subsidiary, Infinitive Speech Systems LLC, along with a joint development agreement with SpeechWorks, will lead the development of voice recognition software and embedded speech recognition to bring new, speech-enabled products and services for automotive market applications, telematics, multimedia, information services, personal productivity, banking, finance, and other applications.

"The initial development efforts of Infinitive Speech Systems with SpeechWorks, are targeted at delivering Visteon's voice technology application commitments to our global OEM customers," said Brian Radloff, General Manager of Infinitive Speech Systems. "The creation of this subsidiary allows Visteon to accelerate the development of compact, portable solutions, which enable integration across a full range of telematics and multimedia products."

Currently, Visteon Voice Technology is available to consumers on some production vehicles. It allows drivers to use voice commands in the vehicle to adjust the climate control, audio systems, and hands-free mobile phone with voice activated dialing capabilities in multiple languages. With the creation of Infinitive Speech Systems, according to Visteon, application development will quickly continue to expand into vehicle systems such as on-board computers, palm devices and accessories, satellite digital audio systems, Bluetooth wireless interface applications, navigation systems, and MP3 radio systems.

The North American headquarters for Infinitive Speech Systems is located in Newton, Mass., and European headquarters in Bristol, U.K.