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

Great news

[wertarbyte]

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.

Re:Great news

[sgant]

This IS great news because I've been trying to talk into my mouse now for quite a while.

"Computer?.....commmm-PU-terrrrr?"

Now hopefully my co-workers will stop giving me strange looks...well, one can dream can't they? No, I'm asking...can one dream?

Code-by-voice

[Max Romantschuk]

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?

Re:Code-by-voice

[LousyPhreak]

this would be nothing more than a nice wow-effect, because most coders write code much faster than speaking it

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:ViaVoice

[sibtrag]

Not likely.

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.

That means one ore thing missing in linux gone?

[drmancini]

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"!!

Around 2 decades late...

[Xpilot]

...if only computers (namely Macs) had this technology back in the 80's our favourite 23rd century engineering hero wouldn't have had so much trouble using one at the plexiglass plant. "Hellooooo computer". Still cracks me up.

Human-Centered Computing!

[Milo Fungus]

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 M$-Comment at the end

[echappement]

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 ?

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