IBM Corp has introduced VoiceType, a multimedia speech recognition product designed to enable user that can’t operate the keyboard to do word processing, database and spreadsheet work by dictating a word or command: the product was developed by the IBM Special Needs Systems group and Dragon Systems Inc of Newton, Massachusetts and is based on Dragon’s DragonDictate-30K; it needs to be trained to the user’s voice but has a 7,000-word active vocabulary that allows for up to 2,000 user-specified words and commands (such as proper names that would not be found in a dictionary; it can generate multiple words or sentences of up to 1,000 keystrokes total from a single utterance; and has an 80,000-word dictionary; it uses the IBM M-Audio Capture and Playback Adaptor and is supported on PS/2s with an 80386SX processor; it’s $3,200 from August.
