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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.
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.