By Peter Day in Belgium

Jo Lernhaut and Pol Hauspie are local heroes in the Westhoek of Belgium, and they deserve to be. They also happen to be multimillionaires, not grand or flashy, but still relishing their success.

Their story is a reminder of how great opportunities can be fashioned out of falling well behind the times.

The Westhoek from which both men come is a sidelined bit of Dutch-speaking Flanders tucked away near the coast in Belgium. The name means West Corner, and curiously, it is very close to France.

Language awareness is a very important part of the story. As Jo Lernhaut says in his avuncular way: "Most places have a telephone box on every street corner. Here in Belgium we have a linguist."

Language keeps Belgium on tenterhooks - the Flemish north and the French south, with a little German island in the West, and Brussels, officially neutral in the middle. And now, out of this jumbled tension that is everyday Belgium, something world class has evolved.

Frustrated voicemail

It all started in the 1980s, when Jo Lernhaut was working for an American computer business in Belgium. The company was trying to sell voicemail systems.

But in Europe it was almost impossible, because in those days most countries still relied on the old-fashioned rotary telephone dial mechanism. You can't send dial tone commands with a rotary phone.

Frustrated by this, Jo Lernhaut and his friend Pol Hauspie started thinking about other ways of doing the same thing. The alternative, it seemed, was to build computer software that recognised and responded to human speech, something which all kinds of experts had been trying to do all over the world for decades.

We've all been hectored by robotic machine voices. But Lernhaut and Hauspie come from a country where language is a defining force. They realised that computerised language has to be good to be convincing.

So they set up on their own, an informal, bantering, persuasive duet of entrepreneurs, harnessing local language skills to computer talents to create a company whose aim was to make computers recognise native speech, to write it down and translate it, language to language, across the world.

Let us spray

This is easy to say and hard to do. It involves delving into deep theories about how the human brain works. To produce convincing computer speech, Lernhaut and Hauspie will hire a native speaker; he or she will spend a year in Belgium, every day reading hundreds of words into a microphone.

The speech specialists break up the speech into thousands of parts which the computers can then reassemble into words and sentences. Only this approach produces acceptable machine speech.

With relish, Jo Lernhaut describes the difficulties. The computer has to be enabled to distinguish between "Let us Pray" and "Let us Spray". Subtle, but essential, if machine speech is to be convincing.

This sort of research takes ages, far longer than the founders expected when they set up their company in 1987.

By 1994 they were running out of cash, so they turned to local investors for help. Often they would drive to a baker or a butcher or a doctor early in the morning to demonstrate a experimental version of their speaking software before the prospective investor started work.

They got the money, from 600 local investors who've seen their shares rise sevenfold in value in the years since for this is a technology whose time has suddenly come.

Goodbye keyboard

"Speech", says no less a figure than the richest man in the world, Bill Gates of Microsoft, "is the future of computing". And if mobile phones are soon going to be the way most people connect with the internet, then the demand for computer speech systems is going to be enormous.

Goodbye keyboard, goodbye mouse. Hello, Mr Computer. Europe strikes back in the great computer race.

But that's not all. This modest duo have a vision. Jo Lernhaut and Pol Hauspie have now created a little centre of excellence, still in the Westhoek of Belgium, called the Flanders Language Valley, where companies with a similar sort of computer language expertise can cluster and breed more innovation, just like Silicon Valley.

The roadways of the Flanders Language Valley are laid out to represent the plan of a human ear. It was opened by the Belgian prime minister a few weeks ago.

It's not really a valley at all, just a sodden piece of land within sight of four first world war cemeteries, where the Flanders poppies blow in springtime.

There's real poignancy in Lernhaut and Hauspie's attempts to break down the barriers which have divided human society since the Tower of Babel. The new Language Valley is close to the historic town of Ieper.

Between 1914 and 1918, 300,000 allied fighters died here in the mud, 250,000 of them British. The soldiers had trouble with the name of the town, so they called it "Wipers". It's the kind of thing the computer can't yet understand, but it will do soon.