IBM Corp’s ViaVoice speech recognition is now available for Linux. Big Blue claims ViaVoice is the first commercial speech recognition technology to be ported to the open source operating system. Speech is the next user interface for computing, claimed W.S. Ozzie Osborne, general manager for IBM Speech Systems, in a statement. By offering our speech engine and libraries to the growing community of Linux developers, IBM is encouraging the development and proliferation of new interactive and conversational applications, he said.
However, there’s a big difference between porting to Linux and releasing the source code to ViaVoice, as IBM well knows. While ViaVoice may be the first commercial speech recognition engine to be ported to the platform, there are at least a dozen open source engines in the works – notably Emacspeak, KVoiceControl and OGI. While many of these projects appear to have dwindled away, some at least are expected to reach maturity in the next few months. Whether the Linux community will develop for IBM’s proprietary platform when open source alternatives exist, remains to be seen.
