Japanese and Chinese versions of the products will be available this summer. Executive and Home Editions in French, German, Spanish, Italian and UK English will be available this fall. All versions come with a headset-microphone. ViaVoice 98 Home Edition is priced at $50 and will be available in July. The Executive Edition goes for $150, with the Office Edition priced at $90. ViaVoice 98 Executive and Office Editions will be available first in US English in June. IBM says the product is Windows 98-ready, offers support for a number of hand-held dictation devices and boasts the industry’s largest active vocabulary with 128,000 words. Other new features of ViaVoice98 include: modeless operation, whereby users can now dictate text and issue commands interchangeably without saying any extra words say what you see navigation allowing users to generally speak menu commands, file names, toolbar buttons, dialogue items and activate desktop icons and topic support for special interest vocabularies, with an available topic factory tool to enable developers to create additional specialty vocabularies. The office edition contains just the business and finance add-on and the home edition has more limited functionality and is billed as an entry level product. The executive edition offers direct dictation into most popular Windows applications, voice control of the desktop and applications and includes two specific vocabulary topics on top of the basic one, covering computers and business & finance. The ViaVoice 98 family consists of an executive edition, an office edition and a home edition.

The new version also features hands free editing and correction modes for applications, including Word 97 and Lotus Word Pro. There are now thousands of variations for such commands, making the product easier and faster to use. ViaVoice98 contains the ability to use natural language commands to edit and format documents in Microsoft Corp’s Word 97. IBM Corp has introduced the next generation of its ViaVoice speech recognition software which, it says, contains enhancements that make the product easier to use.

Viavoice millennium edition