Re: IBM just announced speech recognition: was (Re: gnome and handicapped access..)

[Paul Dorman <pdorman ihug co nz>]

This is exactly why it's not bad for new members to go off and buy
StarOffice, Word Perfect, Bru, and all those other closed source
programs. Eventually the open source community will catch up and provide
real alternatives to these programs. In the meantime it means that
people can learn about Linux whilst using it for their normal business
tasks.

I think that a point which should perhaps be coming out of this
discussion is that anyone who wishes to write Gnome software (or any
open source software for that matter) using the IBM ViaVoice SDK should
keep in mind the desirability of dropping in an open source substitute
at some later date. We need to have something in the middle that all
open source projects requiring speech recognition capability can tap
into, so that only that code need be modified for a new API. I don't
think this need introduce a performance hit, and it would keep our
projects from being locked into any closed source speech recognition
API.

So, any Gnome speech recognition layer programmers out there?

Best regards to all.
Paul Dorman

bratsche@dfw.net wrote:
> 
> <smirk>
> 
> Sorry, Elliot. I didn't mean any harm. But speech recognition of that
> caliber would require a great deal of study before it could be attempted I
> would suspect. My intent wasn't to discourage anyone from beginning to
> develop a speech recognition tool, but rather to suggest that we don't
> hold our breath and instead adopt IBM's until such time as there is a
> promising package with a friendlier license.
> 
> Cody