IBM to Open Voice Recognition Software

phug writes "According to the NY Times, IBM is donating code that it estimates cost the company $10 million to develop. One collection of speech software for handling basic words for dates, time and locations, like cities and states, will go to the Apache Software Foundation. The company is also contributing speech-editing tools to a second open-source group, the Eclipse Foundation." There's not much information out there yet - e.g. no word on licenses etc. It is worth pointing out that the Eclipse Foundation was started by IBM.

Comments

Re:ViaVoice

[clone22]

I think you're correct. In this type of voice recognition you define a grammar that establishes the words the application expects to hear in a particular state. A state transition occurs when a response matching the grammar is heard.

HTK is already availabale as open source

[virtigex]

From the article, it looks like they are making their network grammar version available, not their dictation grammar version. There are types of continuous speech recognition engines, the simple version that uses a hand-crafted network grammar (which seems to be the version that they are talking about), which can be used to recognize simple utterances such as dates, and one that uses a statictical language model and which can recognize an entire language.

This is not earth-shattering news, since HTK has been available for some years. HTK was owned by a company called Entropic and was released as open source when it was bought by Microsoft. HTK can be found at http://htk.eng.cam.ac.uk/. and can handle network grammars. This lessens the impact of IBM's news.

Re:HTK is already availabale as open source

[Curt Cox]

Sphinx is a speaker-independent large vocabulary continuous speech recognizer under Berkeley's style license. It is also a collection of open source tools and resources that allows researchers and developers to build speech recognition system.

FreeTTS is a speech synthesizer written entirely in the Java programming language.

Eclipse licensing

[beef3k]

It is also worth noting that the Eclipse Foundation recently introduced the Eclipse Public License, and are in the process of transitioning all code from the CPL to the EPL.

All new contributions will be under the EPL, so if IBM wants to donate anything to the Eclipse project it will be under this license.

Re:Viable

[Metryq]

I've run into some very slick voice recognition software -- some of it is in use on telephone navigation systems (rather than having to punch a number). Considering the world-wide nature of one company I found using this, it must be very reliable. (The person I finally ended up talking to said that the system rarely stumbles.)

Re:HTK is NOT availabale as open source

[bonniot]

I was suspicious about MS releasing anything under an Open Source license, so I checked. From HTK's license:

2.1 The Licensor hereby grants the Licensee a non-exclusive license to a) make copies of the Licensed Software in source and object code form for use within the Licensee's organisation; b) modify copies of the Licensed Software to create derivative works thereof for use within the Licensee's organisation.

2.2 The Licensed Software either in whole or in part can not be distributed or sub-licensed to any third party in any form.

This license is in no way Open Source. Yes, you can play with the source, but you cannot build something useful with it and redistribute under the same license.

Sphinx

[agentk]

Hmm, this is nice, but I was never impressed by ViaVoice. Sphinx is much better to work with.

Reed

Re:HTK is NOT availabale as open source

[Paul Lamere]

For an open-source speech recognition system with a real open source licence check out the CMU Sphinx Project, a family of speech recognition engines, training tools and associated acoustic and language models. The latest version Sphinx-4 is written in Java and is released under a BSD-style license.

Re:ViaVoice

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think it's ViaVoice. IBM sold that to ScanSoft - the root cause for all of the Linux ViaVoice packages vanishing from their website.

ScanSoft also bought Dragon and SpeechWorks. They are the Microsoft of speech recogntion, and have no truck with open-source hippies.

BTW, they are also the Microsoft of optical character recognition, having bought all but one of the players in that space.

Not what you think - here's something that is

[ibi]

They're not open-sourcing anything resembling ViaVoice to the Eclipse folks. Check out the eclipse voice tools proposal. It's directed at making it easier at creating call-center type voice reco apps - not at making Eclipse a voice-directed IDE.

If you're interested in open-source voice recognition check out OSSRI - an effort to bring together some sort of practical large vocab speech recog to linux. They're just starting up, but the mailing list archives hold a fair amount of discussion about the current state of the open-source SR world. (Which, to sum up, isn't that great :-) As a stop-gap they're hoping to get WINE support for Dragon/Scansoft NaturallySpeaking.