Comdex hot on Speech Technologies

Other than Linux, speech technologies are proving a hit at Comdex. Despite Microsoft's recent claims of "innovations such as speech recognition", the event is dominated by the three speech heavy weights: IBM (ViaVoice), Dragon Systems and L & H. L & H demonstrated their new Internet technology which enables a user to ask the computer a question in English. The computer finds the answer to the question on the web, and responds using voice synthesis. Meanwhile the recent announcement by Corel that the whole Office 2000 suite will be ported to Linux (and free to users) hopefully means Dragon's Voice Recognition technology will be ported. Indeed, Adam Cody pointed out that Linux is mentioned in one of their new job offers...

For those that don't get Maximum PC (previously Boot), you might be interested to learn that in the comparison of WordPerfect 8 and SmartSuite Millennium to Word, only the Microsoft lacked voice recognition capabilities. Moreover WordPerfect scored a KickAss product award with a score of 9, while SmartSuite scored 8.

I was supposed to post Adam's link a long time ago, but I can't remember whether or not I actually got round to asking Dragon Systems for confirmation... so I'm posting it now anyway. If anyone from Dragon Systems feels like commenting, please email me.