IBM Soft launches speech analyser for Indian English

["Irfan Khan" <KhanIA@super.net.pk>]

IBM Soft launches speech analyser for Indian English

Our Mumbai Bureau 

17 AUGUST 

IBM Software Group today launched the 'Indian English' version of 
speech recognition software, ViaVoice, for the OEM (original 
equipment manufacturer) market. IBM ViaVoice has been developed to 
suit the Indian English accent with the help of Speech & Software 
Technologies (India), a Tata group company. IBM had been working for 
nearly a year to develop ViaVoice. In order the make the software 
recognise Indian accented speech, an Indian acoustic model with 
frequently-used Indian words has been built, the company said. Speech 
recognition software is used for giving commands to computers, as a 
dictation tool and as a reader, among other things. 

ViaVoice was developed using 40,000 sentences spoken by 
geographically distributed native Indian speakers. The starter set 
vocabulary consists of 62,000 words occurring frequently in the 16 
million sentences collected from various Indian publications. The 
software has been taught the English language and IBM does not have 
any plan to launch regional language versions. The company did not 
quote a price for the product saying it would be sold directly to PC 
assemblers, manufacturers and the like. The software is pretty simple 
to use. After training it to recognise and understand users' voice, 
the software can understand most inflections of speech, making it 
less cumbersome than the previous versions. The software also sports 
a read out feature which can read out highlighted text. The software 
has been trained to recognise words such as lakh, crore, Mumbai and 
Chennai and other proper nouns which are unique to India. 

Internationally, ViaVoice was voted the premier speech software by PC 
Data in 1998. This is IBM's first attempt to deliver a software 
product which has been specially designed for the country. 
Said Vishwesh Padmanabhan, vice president of Tata IBM Software 
Marketing; "The launch of the Indian English version is a part of 
IBM's strategy to bring in products suitable for the Indian market." 
The Indianness of the product was built by Speech & Software 
Technologies. Said Prakash Shukla, president of Speech & Software; 
"ViaVoice Indian English version was developed with extensive effort 
to ensure maximum accuracy to the Indian user." - ET Online, Aug 17, 
1999

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