ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, September 12, 1996 TAG: 9609130041
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-7 EDITION: METRO
The long-sought goal of being able to speak directly to a computer rather than type on a keyboard will take a step closer to reality Thursday, for IBM plans to announce new software that enables radiologists to dictate their reports directly into a personal computer.
The new offering, which results from years of speech-recognition research, is one of the first commercial products available that can recognize a large vocabulary spoken in a conversational tone. Other voice-recognition software that, for years, has been on the market from IBM and others requires the speaker to pause after each word to achieve a reasonable level of accuracy from a large vocabulary.
``What you see here is the first step toward the Holy Grail of continuous speech recognition,'' David Nahamoo, manager of human language technologies at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., said last week after demonstrating the system he has been trying to perfect for the past 15 years.
- The New York Times
LENGTH: Short : 29 linesby CNB