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IBM to Open Voice Recognition Software

Posted by Hemos on from the making-it-available dept.

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.

6 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. Great news by wertarbyte · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  2. Code-by-voice by Max+Romantschuk · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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 :: http://max.romantschuk.fi/
  3. Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. That means one ore thing missing in linux gone? by drmancini · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  5. Human-Centered Computing! by Milo+Fungus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  6. Nice M$-Comment at the end by echappement · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Nice title;
    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 .Net technology. What exactly is the difference in quality and approach between the package from M$ and the one here mentioned from IBM ?