IBM recently posted the IBM ViaVoice for Mac SDK v1.0 for developers to incorporate speech recognition into their applications. IBM's software development kit (SDK) enables programmers to develop both dictation and command & control applications. A 90-day trial version is available online.
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OS X could use some great speech recognition capability, and even more important would be really high quality speech synthesis (output) technology. Not the low-quality synthesis that has been around for so long. I would expect to see evolution in speech synthesis. Anyone have related info?
$995 for the full version of the SDK, and the minimum amount if you want to relicense it is $18,000....ouch....
Meanwhile, Apple's speech synthesis/recognition SDKs are free for download form Apple's developer pages, and they work fine in OS X.
Yeah it costs quite a bit, but ViaVoice is not targeted at people who would use Apple Speech stuff. Apple's technology was never meant for dictation, whereas ViaVoice is.
I can understand they might want to make some money off of this, but I've always thought SDK's should be provided for free (or at least a very small fee) to encourage developers to support their products so that in turn customers would be more inclined to buy it.
But $1000 for this is just plain ridiculous - you won't see any of my software support it...
Apple's PlainTalk system is free and while it's not dictation capable, it runs on more Macs and is much easier to integrate. Even Microsoft's Speech SDK is free and does support limited dictation.
$1000 for the SDK is nuts.
On the other hand, unlike Apple Plaintalk and Windows Speech, IBM is selling this product. So I guess it's not that surprising. I've tried ViaVoice and to be honest, it was on and off my computer (Mac AND PC) within a few hours. I can live without this - so can my customers.
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