IBM Corp and Philips NV are to collaborate on speech recognition technology, the two companies announced yesterday. Philips will license IBM’s ViaVoice Outloud text-to-speech technology for use in future products, and both companies will review and license each other’s technology and cooperate on language development, in an effort to speed up the adoption of speech recognition into the marketplace. Philips is expected to add support for Scandinavian languages to ViaVoice.
Speech recognition is likely to be one of the primary drivers of innovation in user interfaces over the next decade, and will be used in mobile computing, telecommunications and consumer electronics, as well as in the PC industry. IBM says it has spent 30 years researching the area and has over 100 patents. Its ViaVoice speech recognition software is now available in eight languages.
Philips claims 40 years of research, and says its FreeSpeech technology was the first commercially available speech recognition engine for the PC in 1993. It supports 16 languages. The Philips VoCon speech recognizer for embedded systems has been integrated into various consumer electronics products and devices. No timescales for future products were revealed.
