But Microsoft suffered an embarrassing moment late last month when, during a demonstration in front of financial analysts of the upcoming Windows Vista operating system's built-in voice recognition capabilities, the software continually spelled out different words than were being spoken.

When asked how IBM's voice products differ from those from Microsoft, Garr said: "Primarily because we provide an entire application stack through WebSphere," he said. "Speech technology is what it is. We're all pretty good at it at this point."