IBM and Industry Leaders Declare New Era of Speech Technology

Breakthroughs Made in IBM Labs and Collaboration With Customers Making Speech Technologies Part of Everyday Life

NEW YORK, NY - 13 Feb 2007: Speech technology has finally arrived as a staple of everyday life and is only going to become more pervasive, IBM (NYSE: IBM) and a group of industry leaders declared today at the annual IBM Speech Technology Innovation Day in New York. At the event, IBM, customers and partners showcased new speech technology breakthroughs and products that demonstrate their widespread adoption.

Ten years after the introduction of IBM’s first dictation products a lot has changed. Now, IBM speech software can control your car radio, transform the way you receive healthcare, help children learn to read, make driving safer, help companies gain new business insight and improve customer service through interactions with their clientele, and allow people to communicate in foreign countries.

For years, technology pundits hyped the possibilities of speech recognition technology. But limitations like disruptions from background noise and the inability to decipher dialects served as roadblocks. IBM technology has overcome many of those earlier limitations. Similar to IBM’s revolutionary chip innovations for the gaming industry, IBM is now sharing its speech software with clients and partners, providing intellectual property, engineering expertise and design services to improve their products and solutions.

“Many of the speech technology innovations today are based on collaborations across companies and industries, and much of this innovation originates in the labs of IBM,” said David Nahamoo, chief technology officer for speech technology, IBM Research. “Through collaborations with our partners, speech technology has become ubiquitous and is transforming the way we work and access information -- by making it available, literally, for the asking.”

In a global CEO survey conducted last year by IBM, 76 percent of the CEOs surveyed stated that external collaboration was the key to continued innovation and competitive gain. IBM had already created a collaborative ecosystem of customers and partners that have been working hand in hand with its research and development teams to advance the state of the art in speech recognition technology.

The results of three customer collaborations announced today are:

* IBM and Avoca Semiconductor, Inc. announced a new collaborative effort with All Media Guide (AMG), one of the world’s largest music and entertainment content providers, to support voice control and search on digital entertainment devices, using IBM Embedded ViaVoice speech recognition technology.

* Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc. announced that the company will include IBM Embedded ViaVoice technology in its new AVIC-Z2 aftermarket navigation system. The AVIC-Z2 system is also the first to use the newly released Tele Atlas MultiNet database, which delivers comprehensive digital maps of North America and ’point addressing’ to dramatically enhance navigation accuracy. The new database includes detailed addressing data for 45 million addresses in the United States, helping the AVIC-Z2 to route users much closer to physical addresses and points of interest.

* IBM and Alpine Electronics, Inc. announced that they have successfully collaborated on the development of Alpine’s in-vehicle aftermarket NVE-N872A DVD-based satellite-linked navigation system. The voice-activated Alpine system offers drivers hands-free input and turn by turn driving directions in three different languages -- English, Spanish and French -- and lets drivers interact with data in three different ways -- via voice commands using IBM Embedded ViaVoice, touch screen or remote control. The system also functions as a personal concierge and includes a database with restaurant guides and ratings.


For more information on IBM’s speech solutions, visit: www-306.ibm.com/software/info1/websphere/index.jsp?tab=products/mobilespeech

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Steven Tomasco

IBM Media Relations, Research

IBM

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