By TOM MARINER //
Those “closed captioning” sentences that scroll across your screen, and on screens around the world – they mostly come from a firm called EEG Enterprises, based right here on Long Island.
Last week, Tony Abrahams, president of Sydney, Australia-based Ai-Media, announced his company had acquired EEG – and they were pretty excited about it, as they should be.
In his video announcement, Abrahams bragged that the head of the Farmingdale firm, Phil McLaughlin, had agreed to stay on following the takeover. That was a very smart move: Not only is Phil the main face of EEG, he’s helped spur much of the innovation at a company that builds hardware, codes complex software and somehow stays a step ahead of rapidly changing regulatory and video-technology standards around the world – rules and tech that affect everything from your Zoom meeting to your favorite TV programming, in dozens and dozens of languages.
The amazing achievement of instantly turning speech into printed word on video screens fits perfectly with what I know of McLaughlin. I met Phil when we were both working on the beginnings of the videogame and microcontroller industries at General Instrument Microelectronics in Hicksville – he designed the chips, I created the software that made microcontrollers useful.
Tom Mariner: Phil fanatic.
Some of his earliest work at GI involved signal-processing circuits, mostly processing speech – that’s how we first made silicon talk, and later listen. Phil is the inventor of one of the seminal patents in speech synthesis, covering a technology that basically models the larynx echoing through the nose and mouth, with consonants as noise and vowels as frequency.
His team’s first efforts, the SP250, needed a microcontroller; later, the SP256 stood alone. I used the SP256 in the world’s first text-to-speech cartridge for a videogame console, the Magnavox Odyssey 2; later, I worked it into several diverse items, including a talking/listening cruise control for cars (not a big seller, alas, but technologically advanced).
In the 1980s, Phil and I formed the Audix Corp. in Ronkonkoma as a chip-based product-development platform, using the not-yet-released Microsoft Windows. One of our goals was to make it easier to build products using the Texas Instruments Digital Signal Processing devices that were revolutionizing audio and video.
We made some progress, and the science has really advanced since then: Today, artificial intelligence multiplies the same single-channel processing power by 5,000 channels.
Gold standard: Phil (left) and William McLaughlin, and their 2015 Emmy Award, are now under the Ai-Media umbrella.
After Audix, Phil got involved with EEG, the captioning firm that was started by relatives and friends. His chip, system and software-design expertise were a perfect fit for EEG, and within a few years, Phil – already the soul of the company – bought out the original founders.
The innovator saw a stunning future for captioning technologies and, of course, he was right.
Continuous excellence has built EEG into a market-leading powerhouse (and 2015 Emmy Award winner), and relentless innovation – the Farmingdale firm now features real-time cloud-based services, including translations, broadcast displays, live conferences and more – made it an attractive prize for Ai-Media.
Phil claims the Emmy was for his acting skills, but his son William – now EEG’s vice president of product development, joining his father for the new adventures under Ai-Media – says it has something to do with encoding products and services.
I knew Bill when he was a toddler. Now, Phil calls him the smartest guy he knows. Coming from the smartest guy I know, that means something.
Tom Mariner is the chief operating officer of Stony Brook-based SynchroPET and the founder of Bayport-based Kommercialization LLC.
