IBM plans to announce Monday that it will contribute some of its speech-recognition software to two open-source software groups.
Speech code from IBM to become open source
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Isn’t this what Opera is using for the voice recognition if v7.6? If so, maybe we’ll see it in the Linux version if IBM does open source it, and possibly Firefox as well
This just totaly blows my mind! Thank you IBM! Now I have yet another reason to love the rock solid producer of business end solutions.
This will also help the sight impaired since the technology for speech command recognition will be open to all developers.
all i want is a program to generate ridiculously bad robot voices from 70’s era computers. speech synthesis these days sounds way too good.. even dr. sbaitso is far better than what i have in mind.
The day my Gentoo box has the same voive command as my iBook, is a happy day indeed. Too freaking cool!
=)
Lets get that OS/2 Source out there too
Thanks IBM a lot
yaay. Wish to see speech recognition in OO.o soon 
I love the I, the B & the M 
Dr. Sbaitso! That takes me back. I think i got it with a soundblaster ages ago. What did sbaitso stand for again?
What are the differences between this and Sphynx-4
http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/sphinx4/ and Free-TTS?
http://freetts.sourceforge.net/docs/index.php
I remember that years ago, IBM promised KDE its viavoice speech recognition and synthesis libs. Viavoice was never freed, and shortly afterwards even the gratis downloads were removed. Of course, IBM has learned since that time.
Great but bear in mind that this is just IBM following M$ – it’s great of course but I’d really like to see and feel that first and of course it needs to be as good as M$’s thing to be widely accepted for some serious programming..
This is great news but it needs to get out ASAP – note
there have been 100,000 downloads from M$ to be used in .NET apps ..
there have been 100,000 downloads from M$ to be used in .NET apps ..
—
its completely irrelevant for apache foundation and such.
but it should’ve been out there already.
Still, the reasoning’s sound – by putting it out there into the F/LOSS community, IBM future-proofs it against Yet Another Microsoft Low-Blow a la OS/2 versus WinNT. And increases the chances of its development outstripping anything Microsoft can come up with.
Very, very sound business reasoning.
Devon wrote:
The day my Gentoo box has the same voive command as my iBook […]
Well, unless you are not an English speaker. In which case both computers are pretty much at the same level, zero level. Voice commands have always been English specific, and in Mac OS 9 and before at least a Mexican Spanish text-to-speech (not Spaniard, but better than nothing which is what we have now -why doesn’t Apple at least bundle old voices with new OSs?)
The real questions is, where is the code?
I am not hurraying before the parcel is opened. The preinfo stated very limited vocabulary; looks like a teaser only, to me.
What I’d like to see, is a os-independent, voice control engine similar to what freetype2 is for the fonts. Thanks for the person who gave in those links, I’ll have a look.
I believe, in some applications, a Voice UI would be much better than a GUI.
-ak
I want to see the source code, and it would be a bonus if there was documentation like UML. I’m interested in the code more than anything. I’d like to see it now.
Once again, where was the great FOSS solution? Actually I do know of one, that that’s not my point.
I guess I really don’t see how FOSS proponents can claim to be so superior when so much of the “must have” software was developed by corporations and then opened afterwards. If FOSS was such a productive model for developing software, they wouldn’t have to wait around for IBM, Sun and others to throw them a bone while yelling “show me the code!”. Instead, we get to watch the slow progress of thirty, almost the same but not quite “projects” that rarely ever reach the maturity of the focused efforts of what a software company will produce.
what is the strategy in donation source code to a certain organisation?
can anyone please enlighten me on this?
Unless I’ve completely missunderstood the article, the code in question will be “FOSS”. Free Software is about licensing, it’s not a development model. It doesn’t matter how, when, why or by whom the software was developed; all that matters is its quality and its license.
Asside from that, there already exists a lot of Free Software related to speech (e.g. http://linux-sound.org/speech.html).
Let’s cry later, where is the code. If you all were smart, you wouldn’t worry so much about vendors, you would make sure that you were rich, because that’s the important thing, the rest is nonsense, so let’s get some links to this code!
For pushing out new technology so darn fast so that others have to find development models to keep up with you.
This time you squeezed IBM down to their knees onced again and now they decided to give their stuff away. Good job MS!!!
Sun, are you listening and learning …
I’d really love to see that ten million dollars worth of code. I don’t give a shit about Microsoft.