IBM Corp has turned to Dallas-based Voice Control Systems Inc for speech recognition software it aims to sell to the telecommunications industry. IBM, which plans to become the primary path to market for Voice Control’s speech-enabled business applications, will combine its own ViaVoice speech recognition technology with the limited speech engines behind the Voice Control applications products. These currently provide continuous digits and medium vocabulary phonetic speech recognition, whereas ViaVoice is said to support large vocabulary, high accuracy continuous speech recognition. The two plan a range of speech-enabled telephony products that will be sold through developers and business partners, and VCS says it will integrate the two technologies into voice response, voice mail and messaging platforms to make the development of applications easier. IBM plans to offer the resulting new speech engine, ViaVoice Technology Run Time, during the third quarter of this year, and plans an updated version with Natural Language Understanding support during the fourth quarter. A set of ViaVoice Telephony Tools will be offered to developers in conjunction with the engines. Business partners that plan to take the combination include Brite Voice Systems Inc, InterVoice Inc, Dialogic Corp, Natural MicroSystems Inc and IBM’s own DirectTalk division. Analysts Tern Systems Inc says the market for speech- enabled technology reached $245m in revenues during 1997, a figure which it expects to grow to $809m by 2001. Voice Control recently acquired natural language specialist PureSpeech Inc for $14m (CI No 3,379). á
