Honda and IBM team up for advanced NAV voice recognition

Too bad IBM isn't also working with Toyota. IBM has spent many a year testing and improving natural language speech recognition.

 

Voice recognition has come a long way and numerous companies are spending a lot of money perfecting it.

And as soon as someone, like IBM or anyone else, works all the bugs out of voice recognition, Microsoft will tweak it slightly so they can avoid copyright problems, then build it into Windows so no one will have to buy it from that original company.

Then the company that did all the original work will be left with only meager ways to make a profit.

It's happened so many times in the computer software industry that it's a wonder there are any companies left doing software research at all.

I'm glad they are, and I'm sure there are still niches to make money in. But I for one will always wonder how much further along in software design we would be if the computer software industry was a free market and not so nearly a complete monopoly.

 

Microsoft has been working on voice recognition and text to speech for many many years, I first found out about their efforts early in 1998, this year they sent me MS .net speech SDK, so I don't think they've given up, they will probably borrow or lisence stuff from others if they have to, but give them a call and you'll see Speech .net at work. A computer will answer your call and you will have a semi-intelegent conversation.

 

I have no doubt that MS is working on various software projects including voice recognition.

I also don't dispute that they make some good software.

All I'm saying is that they have a habit of taking other peoples ideas, tweaking them to avoid copyright problems, then offering those revised products free or near free by bundling them into a program that everyone is pretty much forced to buy anyway, (Windows). Then when they offer it free, the competition's business model collapses.

This is the definition of monopolist practices.

All one need do is look at MS Explorer. The people that created Netscape came up with an idea that revolutionized the internet for common people. MS then built and tweaked IE and spent millions on it. But they gave it away free. But even free most people stuck with Netscape because it was 1000xi better.

So just about avery 6 months MS came out with a better and better and better browser. Netscape tried to keep up but they just couldn't. They didn't have MS's resources.

So when the value of IE finally pulled way ahead of Nestcape, Netscape's share of the market collapsed.

Now, what happened to that every six month update and improvement of IE? When was the last time IE came out with a significant upgrade? 5 years? Six?

So why did MS go from making significant upgrades and tweaks nearly twice a year and then pretty much stop?

I'll tell you why, MS was tweaking IE not because of their commitment to software or their customers. They tweaked IE to kill competition. And once they did, they no longer needed to tweak IE.

This is just one example and I could site others.

I love free market capitalism. I think it's great and it works. But I'm against monopolies because they are against capitalism. To monopolies it's all about the business model first and the product second.

And that is why I vote Democrat. The Republican party has hoodwinked the public into thinking it's the pro business party when in fact it's the pro big business party, which means pro monopolies and anti entrepreneur. It is about being pro profits over the short term and to hell with a strategic vision for the future.

Microsoft is just the best example out there. And in my opinion, if MS was not a monopoly and the software industry was truly a free market, we would have had full voice recognition long ago.

If IBM succeeds, or that "Dragon" company succeeds in making a great voice recognition program that works as well as on Star Trek, only then will you see MS poor billions as opposed to millions into voice recognition.

And they will only poor billions into it until such time as they own that market too.

I have no doubt that there are software geniuses all across this planet who wonder "What's a promising direction for software research that I can go into, that Microsoft can't then steal from me, so I can then be successful?"

 

I agree with most of what you said, except the argument about Netscape, it is my oppinion that Netscape was bending over a hole, and Bill G. came by kicked them in.

Well now they have major competition in the browser wars, and even some governments are saying "Don't use IE" but MS probably won't come out with IE 7 untill 2006 when Longhorn is released. So they may loose these current browser wars

 

Oh my! My sides hurt :lol:

 

To Ckacey

I may not have all the details correct about the demise of Netscape, but what Netscape and Mosaic did for the internet was phenomenal.

And although I agree that there are now much better browsers than IE out there again, "regular people" are just not going there, if you go by the numbers.

And if MS really does start losing real market share with IE, and therfore real money, they will just start spending lots of money again and re-take control of that market.

My point is simple that MS is first and foremost a business whose priority is profits and market share, not software and innovation.

Innovation only comes to MS for them to get or maintain market share.

In the short run consumers might benefit by the consistency and fluency between programs, but in the long run we all lose. It's just in the very nature of monopolies.

 

I'm in agreement with you.

you may call me Kacey