Home • ThinkDifferentStore • MacBoards • Advertising • RSS Syndication • Newsletter • Contact

Here's an announcement that will eliminate one of my reasons for holding back in adopting OS X as my working system.

IBM has announced its new ViaVoice for Macintosh OS X Edition, a fully integrated voice recognition application for the Macintosh OS X platform. Built upon IBM's series of continuous speech recognition for the Macintosh and designed to integrate with the new Mac OS X, users can dictate naturally into most text applications, easily launch and surf the Web, and navigate Apple's new Mac OS X - all by using their voice.

"IBM has optimized ViaVoice to work best with Apple's popular Aqua user interface and G4 processors," said Toby Maners, Manager, Consumer Voice and Pen Segment, IBM Voice Systems, at the Macworld NY Keynote address yesterday. "We first brought ViaVoice continuous speech recognition to the Mac two years ago. Our new ViaVoice for Mac OS X brings us even closer to making the optimal conversational interface a reality for the Mac community. "

"Mac OS X provides tremendous business opportunities for innovation on the Mac, and support from developers like IBM is proof positive of Mac OS X's promising future," said Ron Okamoto, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations. "This latest release of ViaVoice from IBM offers great new feature enhancements that take advantage of Mac OS X, and we're thrilled to see that ViaVoice will continue to deliver ease and productivity that our users appreciate."

IBM ViaVoice for Macintosh OS X provides users with the capability to dictate directly into popular supported applications, to launch and surf the Internet and access Web pages through voice-activated Web links. Offering a U.S. vocabulary more than twice the size of any previous ViaVoice for Mac product, IBM is bringing a new level of accuracy and ease of use to voice recognition on the Mac. The new product also features faster enrollment, G4 processor optimization, customizable control for speech-enabling common tasks, IBM ViaVoice Outloud text-to-speech (TTS) technology and a noise-canceling digital universal serial bus (USB) microphone.

ViaVoice for Macintosh OS X will be available in Fall 2001 in International English to address both U.S. English and U.K. English users and is planned for other, selected languages after that.

For more information about IBM Voice Systems or IBM's new ViaVoice for Mac OS X, visit:
http://www.ibm.com/viavoice

Charles W. Moore

.