Dectalk 5

[Doug Sutherland]

Seems to me that IBM is way too focused on speech recognition, and
ignoring the fact that people can benefit just from text-to-speech.
The old viavoice TTS is tiny. Its just one dictionary file, one
shared library, and one config file. In total its just a few megs
of space. The rest of the 100MB or whatever is all recognition
stuff, which is very complex, the vvtutor to train it to know your
voice etc etc. I wish they would focus on TTS first and get that
out the door. I also wish they'd make the engine distributable.
It will never become popular if the engine isn't distributable.
As a developer, how/why would I write apps if I can't distribute
the engine? Most software companies make their runtimes free and
distribute and charge for the sdks. That makes sense to me. I
wish IBM would follow this model, but they don't seem to operate
that way. I also noticed that they are targeting embedded systems
with very expensive OEM type devtools, and also they are winding
a lot of their software around websphere, an enterprise platform
that costs mucho denero. How does any of this make for accessible
apps for the masses? I don't think it does :(

   -- Doug