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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.
This is great, ViaVoice has disappeared for quite a while now on linux, I hope that this will open a great variety of cool open source applications. If this will be made modular like e.g. festival, I can think of endless applications worth using it.
Life is just nature's way of keeping meat fresh.
Is this ViaVoice? The linux packages have been pulled off the IBM site a year or so ago but they're still floating around.
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Eclipse is actually a kind-of Swiss Army Chainsaw -IDE. You can make plugins for pretty much everything, so one could speculate that a voice recognition plugin would be feasible.
I don't know about everyone else, but the concept of coding by voice does fascinate me. There are obvious issues (like eliminating having to say every single control character (if at all possible)), but with a background of RSI I think it's at least worth a shot.
Thoughts?
.: Max Romantschuk
Why is it doing this, is it because they think they can make more money with increased software sales? It also might be an advertising campaign, $10 million donation is buying a lot of free coverage.
Corporations dont usually give a way stuff for nothing, in fact their mission by law is to maximize profit.
When you look at GNU/Linux as a complex system and think of the things that users complain about when Linux usability is concerned, GPL'd speech recognition software is definitely one of them.
Hooray for IBM and as Ali said in the Linux ad "don't back down"!!
Never underestimate the power of idiots in large groups
My brother (who works for IBM) recently sent me an article on USA Today about the system IBM and Honda have developed for speech-interface with a GPS-enabled navigation computer. Really cool stuff.
For those of you who haven't read it, check out The Unfinished Revolution by Michael Dertouzos. I don't agree with all of his analysis (he was a little lacking in pragmatism on some points), but overall this book was very insightful. This book, along with Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee, caused a big paradigm shift in my thinking about computer technology.
Nice title;
.Net technology. What exactly is the difference in quality and approach between the package from M$ and the one here mentioned from IBM ?
Speech code from IBM to become open source
And even better.. the comment from Microsoft, quoted at the end of the article
"IBM has not executed in bringing this technology to a broad market as Microsoft has."
Beside the jokes; The article states as well that Microsoft introduced their Speech Server 2004 last March, and that 100,000 software programmers have downloaded Microsoft's free software developers' kit for building speech applications on its Windows
Maybe set up sort of a ViaVoice@Home project where every geek can help training the software?
Actually it should be quite easy: The client reads your keyboard and the microphone, and you are supposed to speak loudly whatever you type. The training results are regularly exchanged with the central server.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
IBM Hursley labs had a name dialler 5 years ago that let you phone the computer, say the name fo the person you wanted to speak with, and get put through. They also had a system that provided weather forecasts based on the name of the city or country you said. I was pleased to name the latter "Global Weather Information System" or GWIS, pronounced Gee-whizz. Both ran on the machine under my desk. Both worked reasonably well, especially given that a lot of the acoustic models for names and places were automagically generated.
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
I used to work for MacSpeech, we also did large vocabulary dictation systems like ViaVoice.
Back when I was there it really wasn't viable for most people.
However, not all people can type, this includes both the "Hands Free" market (disabilities) and the "Hands Busy" market. Surprisingly, many people also don't want to type, this includes medical and legal professionals. They have an interesting problem, they often need to generate large amounts of boilerplate text quickly. Doctors, Radiologist, Lawyers are also all pretty smart and they heavily use the macro packages to contstruct documentation systems that suit their needs exactly. As you might also imagine, VARS step in and also make these macros.
Is it for you? Maybe not, but it is for a lot of people.