Now this is pretty cool. IBM has released source code for future speech-recognition applications. While this is very much still in mid-stream, this could really allow the technology to finally mature a little bit.

The company announced earlier this month that it will give software components to the Apache Software Foundation, an organization that supports a range of open-source software projects, to make it easier for Web developers to build speech-enabled Web applications.

It is also planning to give speech mark-up editors to the Eclipse Foundation, an open-source software development platform, to help developers to write standards-based speech applications.

Mike Milinkovich, the executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, told ZDNet UK on Friday that the mark-up editors will be implemented as an Eclipse plug-in and will be integrated with the other tools that it already provides.