Speech recognition, one of the computing world's long-deferred dreams, will be highlighted in separate initiatives from Microsoft and IBM next week. On Monday, Microsoft, along with representatives from Cisco Systems, Intel, Philips and SpeechWorks, will hold a press conference at its Mountain View, Calif., offices. The companies will announce a collaborative effort to lay the groundwork for accessing the Web through voice commands, according to a statement from Microsoft. The idea behind the effort is to come up with practical ways to "provide consumers with multiple means of accessing information anytime, anywhere over a number of different devices--including PCs, wireless (handhelds), mobile phones and telephones--over diverse networks," according to Microsoft. IBM, meanwhile, will unfurl the technical details behind the PowerPC 405LP, a chip for handhelds that contains dedicated circuitry for performing speech recognition.
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