CNET: IBM Unveils Toolkit for Talking Computers

“IBM on Wednesday announced the general availability of a
software toolkit developers can use to build speech-recognition and
other ‘multimodal’ applications for Linux computers.

“The Multimodal Toolkit for WebSphere Studio helps developers
create applications that can use more than one mode of
communication. An example of a multimodal application is software
on a personal organizer that can understand voice commands (‘I need
Mr. X’s e-mail’) and respond with a text message.

“Although speech-recognition software has yet to become a
mass-market phenomenon, interest in it is being spurred by
technological breakthroughs and the growth of computing devices
that don’t have room for full-size keyboards…”

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