Re: Patents and VoiceXML 2.0

Dear Cary
Your message caught my attention.
theorom productions is a small French company that has been working in
speech technologies for the past 4 years, with no support from any large
company or university.
We have developped a tool that contains everything you need for building a
speech-enabled application.
Our own web site has been voice-enabled since June 1999, in French and
English, no voice training required. (www.theorom.com)

If you would like to sample our SDK, we would be glad to send you the kit.
Our licence costs are also very attractive as we believe in some sort of
"voice-tec democracy" and we want to get as many people as possible using
this stuff.

All these papers and publications call for confusion. At the end  of the
day, you still need an engine and implementation.

Our tools are COM based and can be integrated into all com compatible
applications, that's saying a lot.

Look forward to hearing from you.



----- Original Message -----
From: "Cary Lancaster" <Cary.Lancaster@comdial.com>
To: <www-voice@w3.org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2001 8:30 PM
Subject: Patents and VoiceXML 2.0


> If I may add my voice to the clamor over the inclusion of patent-covered
> material in the W3C spec...
>
> We are a small company and like many small companies, can't negotiate
large
> patent sharing agreements with patent holding companies and individuals.
As
> our company tries to develop software to compete in the modern
> communications world, we are frustrated by so called standards that
require
> us to pay royalties to specific individuals or companies.  We cannot
really
> affort to pay much in the way of royalties (or wish to pass on the added
> cost to our users) and really resent that standards organizations would
> actually further the business models of the patent holders at the expense
of
> small innovators like ourselves.
>
> If a company creates good technology and gets a patent for it, good job!
> Let that company or individual take responsibility for publishing,
marketing
> and distributing the necessary specification to allow it to be
used...after
> all, they reap the rewards.
>
> Large respected standards bodies like W3C actually drive the choice of
what
> technology will be adopted by the general development community.  By
backing
> patented technology, they hurt small companies like ourselves, and add
cost
> to the end-users!
>
> Thanks,
>
> Cary Lancaster
> Staff Scientist
> Comdial Corp.
>
>
>
>

Received on Thursday, 25 October 2001 03:36:42 UTC