IBM is continuing to give away software to the open source community. The company's latest offering is speech software that the company - with the support of more than 20 key industry players - is donating to the Apache Software Foundation and the Eclipse Foundation. The effort is designed to increase interoperability between vendors, thus giving the speech community more choices and resources.

Specifically, IBM is contributing Reusable Dialog Components (RDCs) to

Apache and proposing a donation to Eclipse of markup editors for speech standards established by the W3C. Developed by IBM Research, RDCs are Java Server Page (JSP)

tags that enable dynamic development of voice applications and multimodal user interfaces. W3C VoiceXML 2.0 is automatically generated at runtime with JSPs that incorporate RDC tags. RDCs are often used in speech applications that allow, for example,  a caller to book a flight using an auto-agent over the phone. They are the most basic units of speech software that allows such basic functions as date, time, currency,

locations (major cities, states, zip codes), to work.

With standards-based programming models, J2EE developers can add voice interaction to Web applications. IBM said that it wants to end the competition among speech developers, whereby each developer attempts to advance their own software platform. IBM believes that making the RDC framework available to the community will prompt the development of components that will harmoniously work together, regardless of the vendor that created them.

The Apache Foundation will receive both the framework and a set of example tags.

IBM's contribution of speech markup editors to Eclipse is aimed at making it easier for developers to write standards-based speech applications as well as creating and utilizing RDCs within those applications. Not only do speech developers benefit by having a standard way of writing VoiceXML applications, but web developers gain tools to more easily add speech access to their web applications.

IBM most recently contributed its Cloudscape database to the Apache open source community as well and subsequently providing additional developer resources for

the community to build on Cloudscape. "This is the latest step in IBM's contribution to open source and to speech technology," said Gary Cohen, General Manager, IBM Pervasive Computing. "By giving more standards-based speech resources to the development community, IBM hopes to accelerate development and drive innovation in all areas of the speech ecosystem—from speech vendors, to ISVs, to platform providers."

Regarding Eclipse, the foundation that IBM launched in 2001 will play a more active role with Java developers. Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation, "Since its initial $40 million contribution to launch Eclipse in November of 2001, IBM has continued to contribute to making Eclipse an open platform for application development and integration. With this project proposal, IBM is taking another step toward propelling innovation and giving Java developers the tools to work speech technology into their applications."