Priced at £139 R.R.P., ViaVoice Gold is a feature-enhanced version of IBM's industry-leading ViaVoice product, the company's first general purpose, continuous dictation product for the consumer market.
"Computing plays an increasingly large role in our everyday lives and it is essential that the industry makes it easier for people to interface with their PC," said W.S. (Ozzie) Osborne, general manager of IBM Speech Systems. "ViaVoice Gold meets this challenge by providing a natural, intuitive way to get the most productivity from your computer."
ViaVoice Gold is ideal for home or business users who frequently generate large amounts of text, or for those who are looking for an innovative and friendly alternative to the keyboard and mouse. It lets people use their voice to do a variety of tasks on their computer, including voice-typing letters, reports and e-mail messages, opening and closing computer files and navigating the desktop.
Users can enter text much faster (up to 140 words a minute) than the average person can type.
New Features
Based on innovations from IBM Research and designed by a world-wide development team, ViaVoice Gold features speech-enabled command and control, navigation, voice correction, and support for direct dictation into most Windows** applications that accept text. Users can issue commands such as "file print," "file save," and "scroll up/down" rather than using the keyboard or mouse to execute these tasks. ViaVoice Gold offers people the benefit of dictating directly into Windows applications, including word processors, spreadsheets and databases. A new text-to-speech feature also allows the computer to read text to you (text-to-speech is currently available in the UK English, French, German and US English versions of ViaVoice Gold).
Existing Features
ViaVoice Gold also offers all of the features found in ViaVoice. In addition to direct dictation into Windows applications, users have the option of SpeakPad*, a full-function word processor included with the software. ViaVoice Gold includes , a "vocabulary expander" that can analyse all your computer documents and automatically add frequently used unique words, like names or products, to increase the active vocabulary to 64,000 words.
Delayed correction allows users to input their words onto the screen and go back later to make refinements. Delegated correction lets the writer pass the original document to another person for editing purposes. In addition, ViaVoice Gold records the voice of the original writer for playback during the editing process.
Easy To Use Out Of The Box
People can begin using ViaVoice Gold almost immediately after installation. Following a short three-sentence session with the User Wizard Quick Training, writers can begin dictating. There is also a recommended voice enrolment of 100 sentences that further improves recognition. ViaVoice Gold also allows multiple users to enrol, recognising the individual acoustics of each user. Users can enrol for different acoustical environments, such as the relative quiet of an office, or the noisy conditions on an aeroplane. ViaVoice Gold users can create dictation shortcuts with a single voice command. These shortcuts automatically insert commonly used passages, such as addresses or opening and closing paragraphs, into correspondences.
System Requirements
ViaVoice Gold runs on both Microsoft Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0** and works with most Pentium** computers available today that are equipped with industry-standard sound cards such as SoundBlaster 16** or those that are 100 percent compatible with Creative Labs SoundBlaster 16. Minimum requirements for ViaVoice Gold are 125 MB of free hard disk space, 32 MB RAM (48 MB RAM for Windows NT) and a Pentium 166 MHz processor or 150 MHz with MMX.
Availability and Pricing
ViaVoice Gold is available for £139 R.R.P., which includes a noise-cancelling headset microphone and 30 days telephone support from IBM. ViaVoice Gold is available in your local PC World, Dixons, high street store and specialist speech resellers.
ViaVoice Gold is also available in French, German, Spanish, Italian and U.S. English.
Speech Recognition Leadership
IBM set the industry standard for speech recognition software when it launched the VoiceType family of products. With more than 25 years of research in the field, the company has built a team of speech recognition specialists world-wide, dedicated to the development, support, marketing and sale of IBM speech solutions in many languages.
* IBM, SpeakPad, and ViaVoice are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation.
** Trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
For further information please contact:
Kate Stretton/Ross Williams
Charles Barker Plc
0171 830 8462/8424
kates@cbarker.co.uk
rossw@cbarker.co.uk
Elaine Richards
IBM UK Ltd
0171 202 5606
elaine_richards@uk.ibm.com
This release and other information from IBM are available electronically ON NEWSdesk, the online IT news network. If you are not currently accessing the service, it can be reached on the Internet at: http://www.newsdesk.com, or dial-up software can be obtained by calling +44 (0) 115 9 405300.