Wizzard Software Offers new addition of IBM TTS for Linux

[John Heim]

I suspect this is essentially a "pre-announcement" -- which is a thing IBM 
quite literally invented, by the way. Back in the 60s, DEC was developing a 
new generation of machines and IBM "pre-announced" their next generation of 
machines that would supposedly blow the DEC machines out of the water. So 
when the DEC machines went to market, a lot of people said "We'll just wait 
to see what IBM does" rather than buy the DEC machines.

Since then it's been pretty much standard practice industry-wide to 
announce that you're going to produce something so many months or even 
years in advance. If nothing else, it gets your name in the papers.

Note the mention of  "minimum order requirements". Last time we talked 
about ths, the minimum order was 1000. I suspect Wizard bought the right to 
distribute a thousand or whatever licenses. But they may not actually have 
any products of their own to go along with the licenses.

I think if IBM was smart, they'd hop on the nopernicus bandwagon, put some 
resources into getting that ready for prime-time, and then sell the speech 
engine like DEC does (through an OEM). It's $50 for DECTalk software. And 
that's cheap. JAWS is still hundreds of dollars.   IBM's home page reader 
was $150. I don't know if that's even still available. But ViaVoice is 
better than DECTalk software and they could probably charge more for it 
especially if it worked with a GUI interface equivalent to JAWS for Windows.





At 03:30 PM 7/22/2004, Lee_Maschmeyer at wayne.edu you wrote:
>Sorry, if you ever get around to following those links you'll end up
>with the same question we have. Either that, or we're all
>exceptionally obtuse.
>
>
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