IBM Drops Linux ViaVoice SDK

quick_dry_3 writes: "IBM's ViaVoice list moderator says that "IBM continues to support the Linux community by integrating Linux into all key products. The Linux desktop dictation product is still available and will continue to be sold. At this time, we have decided to discontinue our SDK for developing desktop Linux voice-enabled applications." Full copy of email is here."

Not Surprised

[MrRudeDude]

IBM was always a little too controlling with their via voice stuff. They wouldn't let people bundle via voice into a application to redistribute it, you had to instruct the end user to install via voice and then install your stuff, which I happen to know stopped at least one person from distributing a pretty cool application beyound a few of his friends (it was an IRC client that read out loud).

Of course I'm preaching to the choir here on /., but the lesson is, never sink lots of time/money/heartache into something that isn't Free as in Freedom.

Possibly IBM's policies are the result of recognizing that they have an incredibly powerful product in via voice, and trying to figure out how to turn it into the cash cow it should be. Perhaps they could GPL (not LGPL) the library, and let the Free Software writers popularize it and make it the de-facto standard, and hope to make money selling non-GPL licenses to those companies that don't want to GPL their applications. Not a sure thing by any means, but maybe it would be better than what they are doing now. I think their current action of withdrawing that SDK hurts them more than it helps them.

A shame

[grrussel]

The ViaVoice SDK had a better sound quality than any other TTS API I could find on Linux. The API was also very simple to use.

For alternatives, try FreeTTS (written in Java 1.4 !), Flite or Festival. These are all free software.

CMU Sphinx

[mbrubeck]

Another free software speech recognition project: CMU Sphinx [cmu.edu]

ViaVoice dictation software

[woggo]

Has anyone here used the VV dictation software on Linux? I'm interested in hearing how good it is, and whether or not it works with arbitrary applications (i.e. could I use it to dictate LaTeX to emacs).

Also, does it work with a reasonably modern distro? All the info I can find about it refers to RH 6.2.

Re:ViaVoice dictation software

[blooflame]

If it's at all like IBM's mainframe products, they've written to a standard interface which doesn't change a lot from version to version. And I would hope RedHat provides some backward compatibility between versions, too! Standard practice in the corporate world - prepare to go to version X+1, but have version X as a fallback position should flames spout out and the phone start to melt down. Therefore we expect enough compatibility between versions to be able to switch without breaking any applications (or else enough forewarning to rework the ones that will break). So, what I'm trying to say is that the OS distibution version shouldn't make that much difference.

Re:ViaVoice dictation software

[woggo]

RedHat 6.2 uses a different glibc than the 7.x series. glibc 2.2, which is included with 7.x, is much better on 2.4 kernels, but applications compiled against an earlier glibc won't run on it. OTOH, using glibc 2.2 statically linked in on a 2.4 system imposes a huge performance hit IME.