IBM Corp hints that it will launch software for the RS/6000 that takes slowly-spoken dictation and can recognise spoken commands, later this year. The software, code-named Tangora for Albert Tangora, who holds the world record for typing – doing 147 words a minute for an hour. The prototype has a vocabulary of 20,000 words and can take dictation at from 50 to 70 words per minute, but the speaker has to pause between each word. IBM says the software, which it demonstrated at Unix Expo last week, can handle continuous speech, but needs a mainframe rather than an RS/6000 to do it. It works by matching what it hears with the phonemes in its database, checking context to decide the most likely word where there are ambiguities.
