IBM-Avaya Speech Deal Offers More Access to Customers.

Publication: eWeek

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc.

I attended my fifth or sixth SpeechTEK expo in New York on Monday, this time early enough to catch the 8:30 a.m. keynote. Steve Mills, senior vice president of the IBM Software Group, announced IBM's intention to foster the "speech development ecosystem" by offering up IBM's RDCs (reusable dialog components) as open source through the Apache Software Foundation, and its speech application development tools through the Eclipse Foundation.

He also announced that IBM would work with Avaya to more closely integrate its tools, RDCs and its WebSphere application server platform with Avaya's call-center and telephony pieces.

I don't know quite how jaded to be about this announcement. Certainly, there is no news in "growing the speech ecosystem" by embedding the specialized expertise of speech experts in modular containers. Neither is there much news in offering these components through templates or through the same IDEs (integrated development environments) used by legions of J2EE programmers.

This is something that's been done before by other speech app-generator vendors,...

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