Learning about XM Radio's VoiceBox Technology powered by IBM's Embedded ViaVoice software

IBM brought somemore insight into XM Radio's upcoming voice recognition technology (created by partner VoiceBox Technologies) when they unveiled their new speech recognition technology on Tuesday. The real meat and potatoes is the Free-Form Command feature found in Embedded ViaVoice 4.4 software. For Free-Form Command to work, it must recognize two things: first, that the user is referring to the radio, even if the term "radio" isn't actually used. Second, the software has to be programmed to understand that the term "play" also is a command to tune the satellite radio unit to the desired channel.

It's really very cool to learn about how the software itself works, and this is seriously groundbreaking stuff. Definitely check it out.

[PC Magazine]