IBM'S Indian English version of Via Voice 98 sounded out

Our Bureau, Mumbai, Aug 17: IBM Software Group today launched the Indian English version of its speech recognition software Via Voice 98. The software has been developed for the Indian English accent with the help of Speech and Software Technologies (I) Pvt. Ltd, a Tata company.

The software enables voice-implemented desktop navigation, dictation of popular applications, spreadsheet building and so on.

It will be marketed through the OEM route and cannot be purchased off the shelf by PC users. There are several reasons for this, said Mr. Viswesh Padmanabhan, Vice-president, Software and solutions Developer, Marketing, Tata IBM Ltd.

"We are looking at it from the marketshare point of view. We are not looking at low-volume high-margin sales."

Tata-IBM would tie up with OEM distributors across the country, said Mr. Padmanabhan. It would tie up with PC manufacturers, peripherals distributors, large publishers and OEMs by bundling the software with their products.

"This would increase the brand value," said Mr.Padmanabhan. "We have to move quickly to address the large section of the market."

The software's eventual application would go much further than PCs, in particular in embedded technology for products such as telephones, calculators, digital diaries, appliances and so on which would increasingly become more interactive, he added.

With the Indian PC market growing at 33 percent, the home segment growing at 89 percent, and with 70 percent of this home segment being catered to by assemblers and GIDs, Tata-IBM feels the OEM approach would work well.

Tata-IBM did not ascribe a price to the software, saying the pricing strategy depended on the arrangement with distributor or manufacturer.

Typically, such a product would be of great use to profesionals. In the US, for instance, IBM has developed products for professionals in the medical and legal fields for record retention and so on.

Corporate executives as well would find such a programme immensely useful, felt Tata-IBM. In India, in particular, English was the universal language of the business community.

Tata-IBM has already signed up with National Informatics Center for what it called a "strategic entry" Product.

Mr.Prakash Shukla, Managing Director, Speech and Software Technologies (I) Pvt. Ltd, said the product development took nearly a year. Via Voice Indian English's data bank has a starter set vocabulary of 62,000 words occurring frequently in the 16 million sentences collected from various Indian publications; it can be trained to use an additional 62,000 personal words.

It has been trained to respond to Indian place names and words such as 'lakh', 'crore' and so on. It also responds to a range of Indian accents.


Source: Business Line - Chennai, August 18, 1999 edition