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Linux PDA w/Voice Recognition

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the ain't-that-interesting dept.

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.

3 of 69 comments (clear)

  1. Some more info... by Dilbert_ · · Score: 4

    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.

    --
    superblog.org: all your favourite blogs on o
  2. Adding voice recognition is the wrong idea by leshert · · Score: 4

    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.

  3. Linux PDA speech CLI by joshv · · Score: 5

    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