The Philips Speech Processing division of Philips Electronics NV is to launch its first speech recognition product targeted at the consumer market place. The company will introduce FreeSpeech 98, designed to be used on personal computers, at PC Expo later this month. The Vienna, Austria headquartered division is confident that with a price tag of just under $40 the product will be an affordable and comprehensive application, and declares speech recognition has come of age. FreeSpeech 98 uses natural continuous speech recognition for dictation and voice commands for application control within the Windows environment including Office 97 and 95, by speaking directly to the computer through a microphone. Philips has decided not to include a microphone with the software, because according to Matt Van Vleet, the division’s North American director of corporate communications, the company wants to give consumers a choice of hardware to use. FreeSpeech recognizes 270,000 words and contains a playback facility to enable simple editing and proofing capabilities. Philips has decided to sell FreeSpeech only over the Internet. According to Van Vlett this is partly to support Philips Electronics’ electronic commerce commitment, partly due to past successes, and because it believes potential customers will have web access and want to purchase electronically. When FreeSpeech becomes available on June 15, there will be one version in American English, but there are plans a foot to release further versions for the international market.
