Linux PDA w/Voice Recognition

Hotaine writes "Lernout & Hauspie is working on a Linux PDA with speech regognition built-in. " It can do things like read (and record) emails, find weather, do stock quotes or whatever. Of course, you can't go out and simply buy the vaporware yet, but it has potential.

Comments

Re:Shades of 2001

[technos]

I can see that. When it comes out next year, L&H will change their name to H And L, so that they can call it the 2001 H.A.L. Or, if they chose a more subtle prank, they'll call it the L and H model 1002.

'Holy mirror images, Batman!' -Dick Grayson.

Networked Gargoyles; Talking To Yourself In Public

[billstewart]

One nice thing about voice-PDAs as opposed to laptops or palmtops is that they don't need to be accesible or even really small. The part that has to be conveniently accessible is your headset, and the rest can be in a pocket or belt pack or backpack, or on a PC on your desk, or off at the other end of a network somewhere. Some voice-dialing cellphones, for instance, keeps the voice recognition intelligence back at the central office or cell site, rather than wedging that much power into your handset.

One negative about Voice PDAs, like cellphones, is that you spend time in public talking to yourself while you walk down the street. (Here in my part of San Francisco, half the pedestrians do that because of cellphones, and half because of substance abuse...)

If you add visual displays, e.g. i-Glasses, you're adding extra volume and weight, and you get to walk down the street in Gargoyle mode :-)

Reminds me of a story I read...

[Ater]

I dont know if this is a true story, a joke, or just a cute little urban legend, but it also regards voice recognition software. This company had just developed a new, really powerful voice recognition program (this was in the old days when DOS when the most commonly used OS), and they were showing off the software at a press conference. The developers encouraged the reporters to yell out commands and watch the software in action. And immedietally, from the back, some wise guy shouted out "FORMAT C:\, RETURN!" The software worked...

Wonder if there could be an analogous action for this new Palm software.

Shades of 2001

[meckardt]

And when they come out with a marketable version, it will be called HAL.

Gonzo

Some more info...

[Dilbert_]

First off, I work for L&H, so if I sound biassed, hey, they pay for my bandwith... But at least I am an engineer and not a salesperson ;-)

I saw a demo of this thing a couple of weeks ago. Basically what they did was port the Voice Xpress engine to linux, and make it work on a Strongarm II processor. Right now all that was built was a single prototype, and some issues like battery usage are still to be worked out before the thing goes into production. (Estimate : end of this year)

What was also done, was building in the L&H Realspeak synthesized voice. This allows real dialogues to be held with this device. For instance :
-Check mail !
-You have five new messages
-Summarize !
-Message one, sender is J. Random Hacker, Subject : kernel hack. Message two, sender is Bill Gates, Subject is Make money Fast...
-Read the first message !
-Hi there... I just finished a patch for the latest kernel update... blablabla...
-Reply !

You could then use this to dictate an e-mail (because it uses a full Voice Xpress engine), or order books on Amazon (If you wanted to shop there) using WAP. All in all, a pretty nifty device. I want one myself ;-)

And no, it was not vapourware, it really works : with the VX engine you can already get 95% accuracy if you want to, with a large vocabulary. The smaller the vocabulary, the better the recognition. How many commands do you need to read your e-mail ? You do the math.

Oh, yeah, it also has a stylus and screen that fold away into it, just in case you really wanted to read or write stuff.

Adding voice recognition is the wrong idea

[leshert]

In general, taking an operating system and strapping a new paradigm to it is a Bad Idea.

When Microsoft took DOS, a single-user operating system, and added Windows to it, they ended up with a really terrible hack that didn't run either, up until about version 3.1.

When Microsoft later took Windows and added pen support (not CE, but Pen Windows--read your history!), it flopped. Windows wasn't suitable.

When they attempted to port a subset of NT to pen-based devices, they got CE, which has underperformed.

On the other hand...

When Apple abandoned the Apple II and designed the Mac as a graphically-operated machine from the ground up, they got a great platform.

When Palm threw out common notions of a shrunken PC and designed their device from scratch, they won.

My point is that a good voice-controlled system needs to be designed as a good voice-controlled system. Strapping it on after the fact won't cut it.

Linux PDA speech CLI

[joshv]

Me: "p-w-d"

Computer: "slash"

Me: "l-s"

Computer: "slash u-s-r, slash h-o-m-e, slash b-i-n, slash b-o-o-t, slash e-t-c..."

Me: "cd slash e-t-c"

Computer: *silent*

Me: "vi profile"

computer: (reads file contents)

Me: "quit"

computer: "error"

Me: "exit"

computer: "error"

Me: "wq"

computer: "file is read only"

Me: "q!"

That's my kinda computing

-josh