IBM announced it will contribute some of its speech-recognition software to two open-source software groups.

After decades of research and development, speech recognition is moving toward mainstream use. Advances in statistical modeling, pattern-matching algorithms and processing power have enabled speech recognition to interpret a far broader vocabulary of words and phrases than in the past, though glitches remain.

The software for speech-recognition applications once had to be custom built, but now packages of reusable and standardized tools are becoming available.