IBM ships ViaVoice for Macintosh

IBM has released the first continuous speech recognition software for the Macintosh platform on the market, company officials said.

ViaVoice Millennium Edition 1.0 for Macintosh lets users create e-mail, edit documents and perform other computer tasks simply by speaking into a microphone. Text can then be transferred into popular Mac applications, such as AppleWorks or Microsoft Word. The program also integrates Apple's text-to-speech function that lets Apple computers read text back to the user.

ViaVoice for Mac is now available in the US and Canada for $89.95 at retail stores and online vendors, including ShopIBM at www.ibm.com/shop .

More information about IBM's speech recognition technology can be found at www.ibm.com/software/speech .