Ray Van Eng (09/12/97)                   

IBM officials has signed agreement with major Chinese PC makers to make ViaVoice, a Chinese voice recognition system, a standard item on new computers by the year 2000.

The software which cost $5.00 to $50.00 depending on volume is said to be able to teach personal computers to learn to respond to Mandarin Chinese, a dialect most commonly spoken in Mainland China and Taiwan.

ViaVoice requires at least a Intel Pentium 166 MMX CPU and 32 MB of RAM to run - a hefty requirement by today's standard. However, the hardware specification would become common-place in a few years' time. An estimated 100,000 copies of the speech product will go into computers in the first year.

The Chinese ViaVoice version is the eighth language implementation that uses the same algorithm that is used to understand English and other languages.

Although the software is said to be able to comprehend many accents spoken throughout the country, the product is not perfect. Frequent corrections have to be made for the machine properly interpret the spoken commands, though the program can be taught to 'learn' an individual's linguistic characteristics.

The alternative for inputting Chinese into a PC is via the keyboard through the use of a software such as TwinBridge Chinese Partner which requires the skill of a bilingual person (English and Chinese) and proficiency gained through a tedious process of trial and error.