Founded six years ago, LeapFrog grew out of Wood's effort to help his 3-year-old son, Matthew, with letter recognition.

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The owner was in the process of using a speech recognition system to dictate a letter to his girlfriend (no, nothing very steamy), and there at the bottom of the screen was his name (we'll call him Ralph).

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The recognition software is just too slow to recognize more than one letter at a time without producing a slew of predictive errors.

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But America's Roma (who have long resented the lack of recognition for gypsy suffering in the Holocaust) and their allies lobbied so vigorously by telephone, fax, letter and e-mail that they persuaded the administration to think again.

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