IBM is committed to moving first-of-a-kind speech recognition systems into the marketplace as quickly as possible.  Collaboration between research, development, marketing and customers in specific niche markets substantially reduces the time from lab to market, and helps us match products more closely to users' needs.

"We constantly evaluate our R&D efforts in speech and natural language areas across research and product development teams," explains Dr. David Nahamoo, head of the group.  "Our goal is to strike a healthy balance between short-term products' delivery within one year, longer-term technology development over two to five years, and adventurous efforts whose time frame and payoff take longer to realize."