January/February 1997

Magazine Features

IBM’s New Toolkit Connects with a Family of Developers

The goal of speaking to your computer, and having it do what you say, has been a goal of IBM’s speech recognition research team for over 25 years.

Industry reports: are they your best information source?

Staying ahead of the pack in the rapidly emerging speech recognitionindustry requires up to date, reliable information.

More Powerful Chips Allow Better Systems at Lower Prices

One of the most critical components in sparking the further development of speech recognition technology is the dramatic growth in the speed and power of microprocessor chips.

Natural Language Understanding for Customer Service

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems are some of the most commercially viable applications of speech recognition. The way people communicate with such systems is advancing rapidly. It is possible for computers to recognize, understand, and respond to conversational input with complicated structured dialogs or limited vocabularies.

Speech's Holy Grail

Through a remarkable technology developed over decades of research, it is now possible to dictate free text to a computer and have it “recognize” one’s speech and “type” it out, without fingers ever touching the keyboard. Sound waves, vibrations of air, are transduced into electrical impulses by microphones.