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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.
ViaVoice is a wide-vocabulary speech recognition. The article hints at more focused set of target words (times, dates, locations) for the donated package. Sounds much more like the software supporting airlines which use voice recognition systems to help you request flight information.
The strategies are quite different.
ViaVoice encourages you invest some of your time reading training scripts so it can learn your voice and thus recognize a wide variety of words from your specific voice.
The time/date/city system is likely to be speaker independent (no training scripts to read) but much smaller vocabulary.
Is voice recognition software really viable? When you take into account the different accents, dialect and slang, is it just a pipe dream? Is it a software or hardware related issue?
Well, either their spending $10 million on advertising or its free. Make up your mind.
The software they're releasing is probably a project they've given up on (since they have the much more developed ViaVoice engine). Instead of letting it rot in a closet like most companies would, they give it away and score an immense amount of geek points in the process.
Because this same plan has succeded in the past. Take Eclipse, IBM donated the framework for improvement by the open-source community and use it to build their prioprietory Websphere package. They don't have to worry about improving the API, just the extra features that make it worthwhile to buy.
The same scenario applies here.
In the late 90s I talked with an IBM representative about releasing the ViaVoice source under a Free Software license and the person I talked to (I don't recall his name) said that they might be willing to release the source code- the code wasn't valuable to them. The value in the ViaVoice is the "thousands of hours of training" that the code uses to determine words and voices.
So my question is- will the code released include training to make it work and or will someone be able to put together the necessary resources to train the system.
this would be nothing more than a nice wow-effect, because most coders write code much faster than speaking it
-- Karma: beyond good and evil - mostly affected by posting political
IBM is a "solutions company".
They don't make money on software like other companies. The software they develope is used to provide solutions to other people's problems.
Problems they pay IBM to fix. A large portion of the world is now using Linux for stuff. It's free, it's stable, it's as good as a midrange server OS as anything else out there.
They want to use Linux, IBM wants to get their money. So IBM supports Linux.
Also other aspects is what IBM likes. IBM needed a new OS for everything. They have Mainframes, Unix servers, database servers. S/390, Power series, AS/400, etc etc etc.
For a long time IBM dumped money into propriatory software. Once the platform was antiquated, so was their software, and so the millions of dollars of money they put into their own closed source software is a dead end in just a few years. For all the mainframes, database software, developement software, power series, x86, etc etc etc . All these can be fuffilled by Linux. A open source software OS can provide all the functionality that they NEED.
Of course something like OS/400 is better then Linux at running databases, but IBM has the capabilities of making nearly as good. Also this developement also benifits other platforms they support, that OS/400 won't run on.
Buy using Linux they reduce the duplication of effort. No more OS/400 then AIX then this , then that. All of it can be linux, on nearly all their hardware. They just have to make it work.
That's just one of the reasons. They make money from solutions, not software. People buy IBM to make things work, they don't care HOW or WHY, but they want things to work. With Linux they can get things working, cheaper, and eventually cheaper.
No more dumping billions of lines of code into various bits of software that don't integrate and will be obsolete in 3 years. Linux has the potential, thru it's system design and open-ness and flexiblity to never go obsolete.. It'll just change with the times.
Plus IBM would like to see Linux on the desktop, so they can basicly tell microsoft to fuck themselves when time comes.
With this particular bit of software it ties into their websphere and database efforts. Reseptionists can just talk into the computer, people can just talk into the phone, and the computer understands.
But it's worthless without the database and the infrastructure to back it up. If most of the rest of the infrastructure is open source to their customers, why make this little bit of it closed source? It just doesn't make sense.
Sensationalist headlines like "cost IBM 10 million dollars to produce" is misleading.
IBM doesn't give a flying fuck how much money it cost to make it.
There is a well know thing called "sunk cost". It basicly means that money that is spent, is spent. Your not going to get it back. You don't survive long in business if you don't "get" this concept.
A extreme example:
Say you spent 100,000 dollars on a Windows solution. You have found out now that a Linux solution costing 2000 dollars can do what you want, and better.
Your potential to make money on the new system is very high. Your potential to make money on the old system is very low.
Which is smarter? To dump the old software and go with the new to make lots and lots of money? Or to keep the old software just because "you don't want to waste the 100,000 dollars".
A intellegent person will go with the money making sceme and dump the money pit. A stupid person will be blinded by the sacrifice and stick with the old solution because they can't think clearly.
IBM is all about making money. If they figure they can save money by using Linux vs AIX they will. They do recommend it to some of their existing AIX customers...
Think about it this way:
Linux is cheaper and almost as good. IBM saves money, their customers save money. More saved money by IBM customers means that they are more likely to grow and make even more money.
Good will in the geek community, free publicity for something that would have just laid around collecting dust otherwise, and maybe a $10 million tax deduction for donating to a non-profit. Not sure about the tax deduction, but this is a donation to a charitable organization, and you can deduct the value of what you donate to these organizations, such as the value of a used car.
Insightful? :P
The parent even mentioned RSI. Not many coders with bad RSI can type faster than speaking it
Not if writing code causes intense pain. In that case it's a choice between speaking code slowly and creating no code at all.
I hope this ends up meaning open-source voice-recognition. I do hope it does.
(says a double-crush sufferer under major physical therapy)
What he said, plus this gives IBM a few other things for not much money. First of all having one OS for all of their platforms is very useful. The fact that linux comes with so much software already makes it even better. IBM has wanted a comon OS for years I bet, now they have one.
The other thing is that they like the idea of having one very common OS, like windows is. But with windows someone else controls it. With Linux IBM can go where they want, even if Linus wants to go somewhere else. Now I imagine IBM is pretty good at getting Linus et al to do the things that they consider very important when they need it. They seem to have figured out how to play in the free software game better than most.
Like the parrent said IBM never really made money on AIX, I'm sure it made a profit for them, but they mostly did it because they needed it to sell services etc. being able to do it with linux means that they can cut out a lot of costs in several places.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
The last thing I would like to see is a real person replaced with a voice-recognizing computer.
The Alameda County (AC) Transit information number here in the Bay Area uses a voice recognition software to address customer inquiries. The system is very buggy and impractical:
1. Voice recognition is far from perfect. Try getting a computer to recognize the name of a destination or complicated query while you yell it over ambient noise (ex. traffic noise around a bus stop) on a cell phone.
2. The software can only recognize pre-programmed phrases and words. If a user says something that the unexpected, they'll probably get nowhere. Sure, you could present the caller with a list of options, but then why not just make them dial-in options?
Just to compound the problem, the AC Transit system doesn't even provide the option to talk to a real-person!
I'm Trappped at Berkeley.
Nice post, but you forget that IBM is a lot more than one company.
They don't make money on software like other companies. The software they develope is used to provide solutions to other people's problems.
No. IBM makes lots of money off software and patents for software processes. WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere Portal Server, Lotus Notes, and of course DB2 make up over a billion dollars in revenue last I heard. Granted, that's less than 5% of IBM's total revenue but it's still income.
They want to use Linux, IBM wants to get their money. So IBM supports Linux.
For IBM Global Services, yes. For Server Group's blade series, yes. For Software Group, hell no. Where is the Lotus Notes client that runs on anything but Windows?
For a long time IBM dumped money into propriatory software. Once the platform was antiquated, so was their software, and so the millions of dollars of money they put into their own closed source software is a dead end in just a few years. For all the mainframes, database software, developement software, power series, x86, etc etc etc . All these can be fuffilled by Linux. A open source software OS can provide all the functionality that they NEED.
No. z/OS has far more capabilities in the traditional business-oriented mainframe space than Linux at present, and it's stupid for IBM to try to push a Unix-like OS into a tightly-controlled mainframe environment. IBM *is* pushing Linux-on-mainframe as a consolidated web hosting environment, but IBM has no plans to kill z/OS.
No more dumping billions of lines of code into various bits of software that don't integrate and will be obsolete in 3 years. Linux has the potential, thru it's system design and open-ness and flexiblity to never go obsolete.. It'll just change with the times.
Not really. First, *lots* of IBM's software never exits the lab, and much that does dies a nasty death in the market. (See Tivoli for dozens of examples.) Second, IBM is riding the Linux bandwagon simply because *it has to* in order to survive.
Plus IBM would like to see Linux on the desktop, so they can basicly tell microsoft to fuck themselves when time comes.
No they don't. If they did they would port Lotus Notes (IBM's flagship desktop application) to Linux.
Sensationalist headlines like "cost IBM 10 million dollars to produce" is misleading.
IBM doesn't give a flying fuck how much money it cost to make it.
IBM does care, a lot, about how much it costs to build something. Let me tell you an IBM internal secret: Eclipse was meant to take down *MS Visual Studio* back in *2000*. Yes, IBM was hoping that Eclipse would *outsell* VS, and when that obviously couln't happen IBM turned it into a marketing win. And lest we forget history already: it took several months of open-source activity before Eclipse was usable by the masses.
Say you spent 100,000 dollars on a Windows solution. You have found out now that a Linux solution costing 2000 dollars can do what you want, and better...
A intellegent person will go with the money making sceme and dump the money pit. A stupid person will be blinded by the sacrifice and stick with the old solution because they can't think clearly.
An intelligent person will evaluate the total business cost of that solution, and ask themselves if they have enough in-house experience to run the Linux solution with the same apparent reliability as the Windows solution. If you've got some *nix talent in-house, the switch is worth it. If you don't have that talent, then the *one-time* cost of $98,000 is more than offset by the continual cost of a new full-time salary.
Think about this: I could go with a cheapo MS MS SQL setup for my company or a expensive IBM database.
Or you could look at the "free" open-source database and cut both Microsoft and IBM out of the picture.
Because it works 99.99995% of the time, an
"This is a case of IBM following Microsoft," said James Mastan, director of marketing for Microsoft Speech Technologies."
Maybe. When did IBM come out with ViaVoice? It's been a number of years. They even offered it for Linux for a while. When did Microsoft jump on board? Maybe Mr. Mastan's statement is just bull too.
Either way, I'm glad to see IBM doing this. Voice recognition enabled programs open's a whole new and exciting frontier for software developer's both on the desktop and in embedded projects.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!