SPARKLE's industrial partners will use their product prototypes in the development of pilot applications which will provide the operational ground for the verification and validation phases. This will ensure that the multilingual retrieval and speech dialogue systems will have real commercial value and may, in the near future, lead to actual products in the area of selection, navigation through and translation of multilingual information available through telematic systems and services--e.g. online directories, news, financial transactions, home shopping, travel planning--using both graphical and speech access. All in all, the realization of SPARKLE's objectives will benefit European industry by providing fresh impetus for the creation of new products in a topical area of the computing and telecommunication market worldwide.