Voice input viable as speech recognition gets real

The sci-fi dream of conversing with computers is becoming a reality, with three companies about to ship products said to recognise natural speech.

Mainstream products to date have required you to speak each word separately, though high-power specialist systems like the Philips Dictation System could cope with natural speech.

But last month IBM unveiled ViaVoice, its first general-purpose continuous speech product. It will ship in September for a suggested (UK P)169 (ex VAT). A more advanced Gold version will be out before the end of the year.

Earlier, Dragon Systems demonstrated a similar product called Naturally Speaking, which includes a 230,000-word dictionary. This will cost under (UK P)500 and is due to ship in the autumn. Lernout and Hauspie, which bought speech-recognition specialist Kurtzweil last March, plans a rollout of products in several languages from late this year.

All these products will run on a standard Pentium PC with 32Mb of RAM.

And they need to "learn" your voice - they cannot understand everyone.

Their natural-speech facility does not necessarily make them more usable than earlier products, which require a certain perseverance. But speech is becoming a viable complement to the keyboard and touch-screen.

Ozzie Osborne, general manager of IBM speech systems, said it is "changing the way we interface with computers, just as the mouse and graphical user interface did in the 1980s."

All three companies have sub-(UK P)100 entry-level products.

IBM 01256 56144; L&H Direct 0800 973365; Dragon 0124 2678575

- See News Analysis p44.