Santa Clara, CA — (press release excerpt) — Trolltech, IBM, and KDE are teaming up at LinuxWorld to demonstrate IBM's ViaVoice speech-recognition technology running on Trolltech's Qt, a cross-platform C++ GUI framework in the K Desktop Environment.

Matthias Ettrich, a senior software engineer at Trolltech and the founder of KDE, elaborates: “When ViaVoice is integrated with Qt, it will be possible to control Qt-based Linux desktop applications with speech input that is as simple as — if not more simple than — keyboard input. Developers can build speech-capability into the structure of their application from the
beginning.”

In other words, the two technologies running together eliminate several of the obstacles that have hampered widespread adoption of speech-recognition on the desktop, including: inefficient resource-use; suboptimum performance; and the difficulty of “bolting on” this functionality after a typical application has already been written.

ViaVoice has already shown that it can handle the two typical speech-recognition tasks: command and control; and dictation. In addition, however, ViaVoice on Qt supports: TTS (text to speech), in which the system can read any kind of text input and translate it into speech; and a function that allows programmers to define a “grammar” in BNF format. The engine will then recognize phrases that match the grammar, e.g., special input modes for dates or numbers such as “Monday, the first of June” or “two thousand one hundred and seventy five.”

 
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