Wizzard Software Offers new addition of IBM TTS for Linux

[Janina Sajka]

I will find out next week what's up with this announcement. Meanwhile, I
can honestly report that IBM has intended that ViaVoice for Linux would
be available to individual buyers. However, their choice of Wizard as
their sales distributor was perhaps not well suited to this marketing
requirement. Certainly, this has all taken far longer than it should,
especially as it seems we still can't plunk down our cash and download
an executable.

John Heim writes:
> 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.
> >
> >
> >_______________________________________________
> >Blinux-list mailing list
> >Blinux-list at redhat.com
> >https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Blinux-list mailing list
> Blinux-list at redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list

-- 
	
				Janina Sajka, Chair
				Accessibility Workgroup
				Free Standards Group (FSG)

janina at freestandards.org	Phone: +1 202.494.7040