As speech recognition technology continues to gather momentum, an industry consortium dedicated to the cause has announced a new software package designed to make computers and applications more secure. The Speaker Verification Applications Programming Interface Software Developers Kit 1.0, has been introduced by the Speech Recognition API Committee and will be targeted at sectors such as telecommunications, electronic commerce, banking and finance where it is particularly important for users to authenticate their identity before using a particular system or application. The software developers kit is based on a standard set by the consortium earlier in the year and has been in beta testing since the spring, and the SVI is designed to integrate with client-server applications used by businesses across the internet and other data and telecommunications networks. Member companies of the consortium include Novell Inc, Motorola Inc, IBM Corp, Texas Instruments Inc and CitiCorp. Novell’s Bruce Armstrong is chairing the SVAPI sub-committee responsible for the new API specification, and he believes it will be adopted as an industry wide standard within six months to a year. Speech recognition seems to be big business at the moment with numerous companies getting in on the act including software giant Microsoft who has just invested $45m in Belgium voice recognition specialist Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products NV (CI No 3,245). Commenting on speech recognition as a whole, Armstrong said: We’ve had a whole revival of the industry and there is exciting technology coming out that is really changing the industry. The software developer kit is being made available free for software developers and can be downloaded from http//www.srapi.com.
