IBM Japan Ltd. announced Thursday it will start free distribution of a software development kit called “ViaVoice SDK for Macintosh,” for adding voice recognition functions to other applications that run on the Mac. MacCentral has learned an English, U.S. version for developers will be available soon.
Applications by mail and free downloading from IBM’s Web site will be available beginning March 23. In addition to sales of ViaVoice software that enables voice input of text and commands, IBM Japan has been distributing SDK for Windows applications for free since 1998.
Developers may be eligible to license the ViaVoice Run Times to distribute with their products. The runtimes contain the speech engine and data files to be integrated with the application package. The minimum order for licensing the run times is US$18,000.