Slashdot Mirror
Speech Recognition, Voice Verification -- Free
ten thirty writes: "TECHNOCRAT.NET recently featured a great
article regarding the dawning (well, it's only a few of years old anyway) of speech recognition software within the open source community. In particular, the
Sphinx
project of Carnegie Mellon University is discussed, as well as some other systems such as Festival and a public domain project at the University of Missouri. The notion here is that
eventually the GUI, which has come so far over the past two decades, will eventually be supplanted, at least for some applications, by the VUI. The question is, will the open-source community allow the integration of this technology into our society be spearheaded by closed-source vendors?"
What I paid the 60 bucks for was the trainer, a graphical setup and decent techie dictionaries. They also threw in a decent headset. The fee RT runs alright, but without the training it makes too many mistakes for me.
I have a program that sorta does that called "TriplePlayPlus Japanese." I haven't played with it much but it does have voice recognition. So far it has proven to be good at teaching me to read kanji but I'm not sure how well the voice stuff actually works.
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try."
This is not the first time this happens. I have seen this story a couple hours ago (around 1400 EST?). It disappeared from slashdot for several hours and then reappear with a new time on it. This is not the first time this happens. Does anyone know what this means?
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
It'd also be nice in a wearable computer system, though I'm sure someone already has a patent on using voice to control a wearable computer.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If you want to read an example of how things can be made easier, read the book Hard Drive by David Pouge. Despite its obvious Macintosh influence (author was editor for a big Macintosh mag), it shows a good example of how a powerful speech engine would help. For example, an instruction like "Merge all the code up to last week, then forward it to all the project members" takes a heck of a lot less time to say than to actually do.
Save a life. Eat more cheese.
Save a life. Eat more cheese
So there I was, juggling apples and small animals, when I accidentally bit into the wrong one...
A friend of mine would like to find a usable speech-based program that runs on Linux. He's not concerned about it being a free package - he can't type due to wrist problems, and he wants to do his work on Linux, and not have to run a Microsoft operating system for that, but most of the speech packages like Dragon only run on Windows variants. Is there anything usable that's been ported to Linux, or can you run any of the packages in Windows over VMLinux and have them usefully connect back to Unix processes running on VMLinux?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It is no secret to people working in the field of signal detection, and especially speech detection, that algorithms that work well will be extremely valuable.
It is further no secret that Microsoft has been hiring machine learning and speech recognition experts from anywhere they can find them, and paying them pretty well.
You can bet that the best voice recognition sequences will be patented and protected in the US.
For instance, it is easier to drag select several folders then drop them into the trash, than it is to explicitly name those directories in a CLI.
Not always. Not even most of the time, i would say. In most cases, I believe CLI is far more capable and easy to use. Let's imagine I have a directory filled with 100 sub-directories. I want to delete 50 specific sub-directories. In a GUI I have to Shift-click each one, or "lasso" most of them and Shift-click the rest. What a pain. In CLI, i just cook up a regex or two that defines my 50 selected directories, and viola, it is done.
Granted, for the newbie, coming up with that (those) regex(s) is going to take some time. maybe more time than pointing-and-clicking 50 times. But if you make that initial investment of learning regex, you will never have to waste time clicking on every little thing you want to manipulate.
It seems to me that sometimes GUI's lure the newbie away from the initial investment of learning the better way of doing things, and leaves them stranded in the "I hate it when I have to click on 50 different things", world, from which they have no idea there is even an exit.
User: Post this story
Computer: Unable to toast lorry
User: No, Post, P
Computer: Command 'host tea'. Tea is scheduled for 16:00
User: Post the damn story
Computer: Command 'roast ham'. Oven is preheating. Would you like to serve the Ham with tea?
User: Cancel, I do not want ham, I do not want spam, I do not like it in a car, I do not like it at the bar. Just post the story.
...
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
I'm not so sure that this is a good thing. Even with increased quality of voice recognition software, we still don't seem to be progressing very quickly with AI. Of course companies are still going to use this [yeah I know many already do], but I personally don't like talking to computers over the phone. For something simple like "say 1 for Tech support, say 2 for customer service " etc it's not so bad, but even that can be annoying. A friend of mine called Sears the other day. They are set up to have the caller say the name of the department they'd like to be transferred to. Unfortunately saying "Operater" does NOT get you to a human [no matter how loud you scream it :) ].
I would love to have Voice Recognition on my computer. At least in that situation I can see how the computer is reacting to what I'm saying, and if it isn't working right, I can intervene with the normal keyboard/mouse controls. But until the 'intelligence' of the systems is improved, I'd rather talk to a human when ordering something over the phone. I'd hate to accidentally get 200qty of widget X @ $20/ea when I only wanted 2qty of Widget XY @ $20ea :)
Ender
Nothing to see here
>> If you turn up the radio loud, do you think your radio is going to be able to hear you in order to turn it back down?
If you use an inverse feedback circuit on the mic, the only sound the VUI will hear is anything different than what is playing on the radio.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
"...will the open-source community allow the integration of this technology into our society be spearheaded by closed-source vendors?"
This is a moot point. Speech-recognition has been in mainstream use in society for over a decade already. You just don't realize it when it's happening because the computer isn't in front of you.
The closed-source proprietary companies have already spearheaded the integration of speech recognition. As usual, it is the role of free software to play catch-up as the technology trickles down to the level where hobbyists and academics can implement the algorithms and run them on commodity hardware.
I've wondered if it isn't possible to attach some sensors to the appropriate nerves and pick up enough information about what we're doing with our tongue, pharynx etc to recognise silently "voiced" words. If we could use a few discreet sensors to get this to work, it would get around a lot of the problems that are mentioned here, and some more (such as background noise). Perhaps this could supplement regular voice recognition, too? Anyone who's worked in the field care to comment?
Let me tell ya, I've been around for a while, and one thing I know as a fact is once one technology is implemented, all previous technologies are laid to rest. Take storage media. First there was graffiti on cave walls, later came paper. Today, who writes on cave walls anymore? If you do, you'll probably be arrested for destroying some fungus' ecosystem thanks to crazy liberals.
Or take KDE. There is not a single Linux system in the world that does not use it. It was invented, and now text consoles are all gone. A few people squabble wanting GNOME to be the one GUI for Linux. It just will not happen now that KDE is. I wouldn't be surprised if in a couple years, laws are past to make text consoles and GNOME illegal or something as well. Some scientists with bowties will go on Larry King and say how some oddball amoeba lives off the pixels of your monitor and to not use graphics will kill them. You think these ilcomputerate Americans will second guess a guy with a bowtie??
So, speech recognition is coming. Do not fight it. Or I will have you arrested. Oh, and crazy liberals piss me off.
I'm thinking Emacs might be very well-suited for voice recognition.
Think about it: Practically everything in Emacs is done with lisp functions, most of which have names that are basicly english. Obviously you could have the "undo undo undo" thing where the undo function is called, you could also have "revert buffer, yes", "compile", etc. And because Emacs is Emacs and has the "everything but the kitchen sink" aspect to it, you'll probably also have lisp functions for accessing a web browser, mail client, mp3 player, television via your tv card, lights and household appliances via X10, etc, etc, etc.
In comparison, try integrating voice recognition into a windowing system. I can't help but think of that IBM(?) commercial with the guy sitting on the park bench with pigeons all around, wearing a headset thing with voice recognition... "up up up up" as if he were using a mouse with his voice. How unelelgant can a user interface get?!
Yep, Emacs is gonna take over the world, or at least integrate all of its functionality. :)
Yeah but the problem with that is, once your computer is playing U2, you can't give it any more voice commands because of the noise from the mp3s. Also, what if the singer says something the computer interprets as 'shut down'. Think that is not possible? You have never used Dragon Naturally Speaking before. Let it listen to MTV and you would not believe what crazy phrases it comes up with.
:)
And there's another problem with your comment. Who on earth still listens to U2?
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Hell Yeah! Can you say Ender's Game?
Well not Ender's Game, but the other books in the series? You would get the computer's attention by subvocalizing "Jane", of course.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
i'm actually quite annoyed that with all these egg cams and video cam/capture boards, no one has written a decent netscape plugin or even a standalone app that lets me record and send a short mpeg to my associates via email attachment.
if i didn't have a day job wearing me down, i think this would be a killer app for all those people with cams and mics laying around.
please, don't yap about "just grab some mpg and send it" -- i'm taking about something integrated, easy to use, and simple to configure.
---S.D.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Hi. Read this: http://www.kuro5h in.org/?op=displaystory&sid=2000/7/18/122257/231. Please don't b-slap me; this is important!
--
--
He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
I used a Pika Daytona card with 4 i/o lines activated, and the ACS (now called Bayonne) Telephony system to build the scripts.
:)
Custom-built tgiexec (tgi=Telephony Gateway Interface) scripts to be run from the ACS IVR system to give me details on the system, run commands, play back results, etc.
Considering cleaning it up for open source release in the near future. It's definitely way cool to be able to admin a Linux box with a telephone from anywhere in the world!
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
11*43+456^2
Voice recognition at last! Finally, when I talk to my computer, it'll realize who I am! From now on, whenever I ask it to open the pod bay doors, it'll say "I'm sorry Denor, I'm afraid I can't do that".
It just ticks me off when the computer mistakes me with Dave, is all.
-Denor
Even if VUIs work perfectly, there are two major drawbacks that will make many people prefer GUIs:
1. Privacy. Do you really want to be saying things like "browse to pervert site dot com" or "send bankruptcy memo" out loud? Typing and clicking are more discreet.
2. Annoying others. I don't want to be in an office full of people babbling at their computers. I also don't want to be on a plane or in a restaurant near somebody babbling commands at his laptop. It's bad enough already with cell phones.
That being said, there will be a place for VUIs in critical hands-free situations such as in cars.
Everyone keeps referring to the site at msstate.edu as being the University of Missouri. Check your state abbreviations, people. That would be Mississippi State.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Some of this sounds like time-zone issues, especially coming out with an article dated 4:04 when I think it's still 3:28pm :-)
Shouldn't be happening much, but maybe the slashware isn't expecting some posters to be in non-standard timezones, or maybe their clock glitched.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I could work in a room with 200 other GUI users, but I don't think I'd want to work in one with 3 other VUI users. Not to mention I wouldn't want some of the loudmouths around here accidentally issuing orders to *my* computer.
-----
However, rather than using it to control that weapons system he mentions (and I'm sure everyone is really into... car weapons...), what about a browsing with your wireless connection to the internet?
Think about it... Eventually even accessing your MP3 server via your wireless connection and ordering up your favorite album for the trip to work, all using voice recognition.
The Englishman Who Came to a Concert
When ever the subject of Voice Rec comes up everyone always brings up the same old stuff.
1) At my office we have 387 people in one room and I'd go insane.
2) It doesn't work very well yet.
3) rm / -rf
4) etc
But my point is sure, voice rec may not be practical in every situation. Yes it is not very acurate right now. No, no one is going to be stupid enough to make a program so that anyone can just come up to your computer and start deleting whatever they want to. (unless they do crack and then all bets are off... *cough* *ms* *cough*)
The point of Voice Rec is not that it's practical, although it can be in certain situations, the point is that it's cool.
Let me put it this way: Word processors are practicle. But nobody cares about them. You just sit down type out your paper/letter/whatever, double space it, spell check it, save it and print it out. Nobody cares about that. It's just not interesting. You don't tell your friend, "Hey come over to my place and check out this cool word processor I got! It's rocking!!" It just ain't happenning.
But voice recognition on the other hand is cool. I could definately see coming back home and saying, "Hey computer play some music." That would be almost Star Trek like.
Star Trek is actually a good paradigm. They don't do everything through voice rec. Complex things are still done with a keyboard. And in a group setting they manage to keep the noise level down. Mostly when they do use voice rec they enter formulaic verbal commands but the commands are so natural that it seems like more AI is involved in parsing the commands than is actually the case. The people who keep talking about spelling out "rm / -rf" are applying a command line mindset to a verbal user interface but you really want to think out natural sounding commands. The vui Star Trek way is "computer, erase main memory." This is far more natural and would almost make you think the computer understands what you are saying.
You know what else about Star Trek? You never see them using word processors.
I don't think you gave too many good reasons for it.
The crappy motion-sensors on the doors could be better improved by just putting in *good* motion-sensors, perhaps not unlike the ones in Star Trek. I'd rather see the guys at Safeway spend an extra $3.99 for a better motion sensor (okay I really have no idea how much motion sensors cost) than have them go through the trouble of putting in voice recognition. I'm sure demand for employment at Safeway would go down once all the customers start yelling "OPEN DOOR!" whenever they leave or come in.
As for driving, well I understand that paraplegics can drive already with moderate success (enough that they can get around and not get into accidents anyway). True, quadreplegics are pretty much right out of luck, but I'm a bit skeptical as to how the "TURN RIGHT! No not quite that far. Just a little further now. The lane's open! GO! GO!" system would work. You'd be better off trying to abolish minimum wage so you can hire a driver for a dollar an hour.
Programming the VCR and TV might be a good use. Mind you if they're going to raise the price enough to put in the type of circuitry to do voice recognition, I'd just prefer they leave it as is and make the interface a bit responsive (what kind of ICs are these guys using anyway that it takes almost a full second just to scroll up or down in a menu?).
I think the "quick shortcuts" paradigm of speech in UI is vastly underestimated. For example, think about how much mental energy/concentration it would save to be able to just say
"Play U2"
instead of:
find MP3 player icon, deiconize, click load, click U2 playlist, click OK, click play, iconize, put mouse back in editor window, recommence hacking
I think the quick verbal shortcut causes a much smaller disruption of concentration and saves a tone of screen real estate. For those of us insane people who have 6-7 emacs windows, 2-3 netscape windows and 3-4 xterms going on 4 virtual desks, this would be a HUGE benefit.
I can't tell you how much mental energy I have saved since I got a box with external volume control instead of a GUI volume tool. I think a voice interface would help in similar ways.
So, I think voice-assisted GUIs would be great, accelerating the experience just like keyboard shortcuts help keep experienced users sane today.
If it was fast, I would like it for all sorts of simple things. For instance, in Quake III, I want to leave my fingers over a small set of command keys and mouse buttons. This slows me down for switching weapons. If I could just say "rocket" to switch to the rocket launcher, that would make me a little more competitive.
In text editors, I would like to say "oops" and automatically have the last word deleted. That would definitely speed me up, but my cubicle neighbors might get tired of hearing a constant stream of "oops... oops... oops" over the wall. I bet it wouldn't be hard to patch that into emacs...
Bruce's description of a voice-controlled car stereo is also good. This is especially interesting to me, because I am thinking of building an MP3 player for my car that will be a full X86 computer. How do you do a user interface that allows you to scroll through hundreds of albums and thousands of songs? While driving?
Voice command seems like the best solution. Say "Play... U2... Zooropa... Lemon", or "Play... Beethoven... Sixth Symphony". (imagine a little chime from the computer during each "..." to indicate it "got" it and is ready for more input.)
I should be able to operate that while driving without driving off the road. And, a well written voice command program could be pretty accurate for that application, since the set of valid inputs is reasonably small at each step.
I'm enthusiastic about the possibilities. I predict that once people have this, they will wonder how they ever survived with out it. Just like wheels on mice!
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
Actually this could bring about some good things. ;) ]. It sucks.
I once occupied a huge office in Menlo Park,CA. I had a 20' wide window view of the Sand Hill Rd area and the SF Bay. Now I am stuck in an 8'x8' cube [not much bigger than the new G4 Cube
With any luck, all these people talking to their computers will force companies to start giving people private offices again.
Well I can dream can't I?
Ender
Nothing to see here
- How to do speech recognition at all
- How natural languages express meaning using words and sentences
- How to integrate sophisticated speech recognition into user interfaces that will be useful/meaningful/interesting for users.
Research tends to happen either at universities or at commercial research labs like Bell Labs, Xerox Parc, and IBM, where people can spend a long time looking at hard problems; while that can happen in an open academic-type environment or a closed intellectual-property-hoarding secret laBoratory, research is a much different environment from design or implementation, which are closer to what open-source development processes are good at, which are things that amateurs can do using their own resources or that professionals (including advanced college students) can do that piggybacks off their own work, like hacking operating systems or compilers. We're fortunate that enough of the development of speech recognition has been open so it's accessible for use - learning how people make phonemes with their mouths, words out of phonemes and sentences out of words is an immense job if you have to reinvent it.Early user interfaces were simple - if your recognizer can only do 10-20 words, it doesn't take deep design research to design an interface - telephone companies do obvious things with 0-9/yes/no/help, and computer interfaces pick a dozen Mostly Harmless commands so that a misrecognized command or somebody walking down the hall talking doesn't trigger "rm -rf /", it just triggers ls or "play cd" or something. But now that voice recognition can handle vocabularies of hundreds or thousands of words, depending on your taste in accuracy and user-specific training, figuring out what good designs for interfacing with voice users that make sense in the environments you expect them to use is a large set of research problems. Open source is ok for doing implementations of specific proposals for what that interface should look like, and pretty good for tweaking existing designs to do more things, and really excellent for connecting the voice interface up to other things that are already written. But overall, it's a design problem, not a hacking problem.
As far as things I'd see that are useful that voice recognition interfaces can do, some are pretty obvious, like cellphone dialers and dictation tools - you'd like to tell your handsfree phone "call Alice" while you're driving, and have it look up Alice in a database, rather than typing or saying "+1-987-655-3210, er, umm that was 654-3210". (Some cellphone companies provide this - it's not based in your handset, but at the cellphone company's end, using a database lookup on your phone numebr to retrieve your voice settings and your list of names and phone numbers. If you're the canonical carpal-tunnel-abusing hacker, you'd like to dictate some of that business plan by voice using a voice editor that can stitch together words you've recycled from previous documents instead of having to mouse it in.
Beyond that there's a lot of open territory - it'd be nice to be able to walk down the street with a headset on or sit at a desk with a speakerphone or headset and tell your computers what you want them to do, who you want to communicate with, have them tell you stuff you want to know, etc. It's not a direct substitute for reading off a screen and pointing with a mouse; it'll change your workstyle just like adding GUIs and getting cellphones did.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Hardly! I'll happily attest to the power of the keyboard causing RSI.
--
Does narcissism count as a hobby? --Shawn Latimer
Unfortunately saying "Operater" does NOT get you to a human [no matter how loud you scream it :) ].
This probably isn't a bug in the voice recognition software - its probably the company justifying *not* having the expense of having a live operator waiting to take the call by implying that it's a bug in the VR software...
You might think I'm being conspiratorial, but having worked in the telephony business for the last couple of years, I can say with all honesty that this is standard practice. Anything that will cut costs on telephone front lines, a company will do... particularly a large one like Sears, with its legions of consultants.
As for the misorder, well that would suck, but it wouldn't last long - there's definitely ways to ensure this doesn't happen, such as order verification before the customer hangs up...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
But for less experienced users, being able to say, "New message to Bob Jones, copy marketing team, blind copy Jon Bones. Dear Bob, I love you like the brother...." That's valuable, and would be quicker than CLI or GUI if it worked.
Are we talking about speech recognition or natural-language processing here? It seems to me that processing instructions like this generally and intelligently is a much more difficult task than recognizing which words have been spoken and will become practical (if ever) significantly after large-scale speech recognition is practical.
So, until natural-language processing is much more advanced, people using speech recognition will have to utter specific commands with specific options and syntaxes. Does this sound familiar? Will speech recognition offer significantly more than an aid for people who can't type very quickly?
Oh yea, web surfing in the car is a fun idea. Talk about a Fatal Error...
Question reality.
This would have the added bonus that your computer would be able to learn Baachi.
$ cat < /dev/mouse
The obvious way of indicating context is by pointing. Voice control and the mouse could be a powerful combination, but speech recognition alone will leave the computer with too much ambiguity to resolve.
$ cat < /dev/mouse
One of the factors contributing to few developers is the simple fact that english as the only language is almost useless to almost all people on earth ...
Look, how many open source projects were developed by people whose primary language isn't English (Finnish : Linux, German: KDE, etc.).
So IBM: Please internationalize VV for Linux.
Moving trained datasets from the windows software to linux isn't a solution.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
"are em space dash eff capital arr space slash enter."
~ The BOFH
Rather imagine coming home one day, go to your favorite chair, say "browse web", start talking to your browser. Instead of sitting staring at a screen, the browser will read pages for you, you will surf laid back in your chair, telling it where to go in simple instructions. Now, it is just a matter of choosing the right tool for the job... If the "job" is relaxing, I'd say VUI is preferable. And I think it has a great future.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Did anyone else notice that when this story was first posted, the posted date was today at 4:04PM? Makes you wonder ...
./ conspiracy, just curious ...
Do the editors input the time manually, and timothy mistyped?
Do the editors queue up stories and program them to be posted at certain times, but they decided to post this earlier?
Not trying to start
Xvoice is a GPL front end to the freely available IBM ViaVoice libraries. So no, not everything in the vorec world has been completely closed source before this.
Information wants to be free
Information wants to be free
So what? Guns want to kill, but we have laws against that.
Honest question: For what niches is this technology useful?
I can maybe see controlling a speaker-phone or a TV with this, but button-based interfaces are pretty efficient for this as it is. I can maybe see using this for quick shortcuts on a computer, but again, current interfaces are pretty efficient.
For massive data entry or for extended interactive editing, this probably isn't practical (try giving a multi-hour lecture - not too comfortable, is it?).
So, I'm wondering where a verbal interface _is_ practical.
I personally believe, that Voice Recognition technology is an ideal candidate for open-source development.
The main reason is that VUI technology will eventually infiltrate most areas of technology, and by moving forward through open-source with voice recognition, we allow a much more diverse and portable array of technologies to blossom. Most likely, quicker than someone like Microsoft or IBM could move.
The problems I see, are stability and customer support. Can those be adequately supplied in the open-source community, or is that something delegated to the closed-source companies?
It's only when we've lost everything, that we are free to do anything...
Just think of what could be done for the physically disabled. Doors wouldn't have to rely on those crappy motion sensors, toilets and showers would work by voice command, vehicles could be modified with all kinds of cool stuff like headlights, radio, voice-driven wheelchair doors, and even ignition (keys are hard to use on some vehicles because of the location of the ignition ofn the steering column).
It looks like with the toolkit you could develop your own voice-driven DVD, VCR, TV, stereo, or any other entertainment system too.
Surely now that the source is available people will build an industry out of the possibilities.
"These are the days that must happen to you." -Walt Whitman
We could use this service with Speakeasy.
Seems to me that IBM's ViaVoice source code had been released, but apparently not as Free software. They now sell ViaVoice for Linux for $59, and offer a free SDK to integrate it in Linux Apps. http://www-4.ibm.com/software/speech/linux/dictati on.html
Well, at least there is some choice!
jcc
PDA's could also benefit from useful voice recognition. Where the device is too small to support a standard keyboard, voice controls will eventually become the norm.
Everything in this post is false.
I dont' think VUI's are going to be feasible until they are intelligent enough to understand a wide range of accents, including the accents of, for example, non-native English speakers, who are now speaking English, and when they are intelligent enough to understand the difference between slash-dot and /. as an example.
When it can determine "Open Internet Explorer, go to www.slashdot.org, scroll down half way" or "Scroll down to the poll" or whatever -- THEN it will achieve wide-spread use. Not until then.
http://quiz.ravenblack.net/blood.pl?3357354385
Having a speech recognition toolbox is only one part of the problem. As many people in the domain (I used to work in speech recognition) will tell you is that sometimes, the key to a good speech recognition engine is not in the code, but in the speech data used to train it. Speech databases are very expensive and speech recognition companies usually have a lot of "proprietary" databases.
One project which addresses the problem is the Open Mind Initiative, and more specifically the Open Mind Speech Recognition project, for which I am the coordinator. Our goal is to collect data from people on the internet and make that data available to people working on speech recognition with a GPL-like license. I think this is the key to having OSS speech recognition engines perform as well as the proprietary ones. The project is not very advanced yet, but any help would be really welcomed.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
How far away are we from making voice-recognition ....a teacher that has endless patience
software that will allow us to have a computer mentor that teaches foreign language?
and insists on correct pronounciation and grammar.
If we incorperated it into an OpenGL environment of somesort we could have language roll playing tutorials that allow someone to purchase a loaf of bread, milk, eggs and cigarettes in japanese. Total emmersion into the new language. Plus it would allow students to progress at their own pace.
-"You'll have plenty of time to sleep when you're dead."
Seeing as almost all open-source projects are started by people wanting to "scrach an itch", and most open-source hackers use a GUI just to have 40 terminal windows open, multiple system monitors, and a Mozilla window (OK, so I'm exagerating a bit), I can't see any fully open-source solution any time soon. The only place where such a system might be developed would be a University, and with corporations having more money to lure away the researchers, even that may not happen any time soon.
Or maybe I'm just being too pessimistic
To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three persons, two of them absent.
Mike Monkowski - One of the engineers for via-voice recently asked why via-voice had so few developers using it.
I replied with the following-
I would suspect, that the primary reason [there are so few developers of via-voice] is the desire of (free software) programmers to not make their code dependent on non-free (as in speech) software. For better or worse, many Linux programmers will reject, out of hand, any library or software that is not based upon one of the standard free licenses (GPL, LGPL, BSD, NPL, Artistic, etc.).
Given that IBM is unlikely to change it's licensing terms in the near future, and that (free) programmers are unlikely to change their moral stance on using 'non-free' software. Development with viavoice will likely
be limited to commercial programmers, or those situations where STT/VTS are a necessity such as applications for the blind.
Tom M.
TomM@pentstar.com
In a latter post he asked our opinion on the IBM Public License. My reply was thus...
"I did a search on the web for discussions on the IBM Public License (IPL).
According to Bruce Perens, (and the general consensus...)- the IPL is OSD
(Open Source Definition) compliant, but not GPL compatible. Being OSD
compliant will certainly encourage more developers, however, how many is the
big question. Of the free software developers out there, my guess would be
that 80% (likely more?) will only develop (in their free time) with software
that is GPL compatible (i.e. GPL, LGPL, BSD, and a few others). However,
for 'work' stuff, the IPL is less problematic, and thus would lead to more
commercial development (not as much as the GPL, BSD, LGPL - but mostly for
'religious' reasons).
Personally, I would recommend going with the GPL, which would result in full
and quick integration with all of the Linux distributions, and allow source
from many useful GPL and LGPL projects to be integrated/merge with it. I'm
guessing that the developer good will from such an action would be
Phenomenal. The suggestion of another poster that viavoice should be viewed
as infrastructure is very valid. However, I'm a realist. There is almost
zero chance of IBM doing that unless they come out with their own Linux
distribution, and tout complete voice integration as the big selling point,
or, the dollar value of developer good will is high enough to justify
whatever future lost revenue would be. (I'd bet that it certainly would be-
having a 'truly free' voice software solution would be rather impressive.
The fact that viavoice isn't considered a drowning/dying product (I.e.
Netscape) or (in the case of Apple) one that was previously free - would be
all the more impressive.
So, given the above, I would say that changing to the IPL might well give vv
a strong pull for more developers, certainly enough to justify the change.
Of course, as suggested above, an even stronger case can be made for the
GPL.
Tom M.
TomM@pentstar.com
"
If you would care to contribute to the conversation, you can join by sending email to
join-viavoice@laser.sparklist.com
Thanks,
LetterRip
Tom M.
Personally I think free, open sourced software is the first step of many to have fully interactive machines for all members of society. We of course then need to have /dev/speech and other items so that the computer can then talk back.
When most people have some sort of entertainment device running off their computers (be it DVD, CD, VCD or even your automated front door) it would be of great advantage to have voice activation of these devices. A number of home stereos now have voice activation why not the computer? It maybe easy for most people to press a remote or something but what about the people who have troubles doing this.
At my UNI there are some doors with ethernet plugs in them to the toilet. At present you have to press a button on the wall to open these doors. This could possibly give another option. If there was access to a cheap voice activation system that worked this could then be done by more mobility challenged people. (just a personal observation)
One of the security authentication options is what you are. Speech is definitely one option for this. So in the future we may have a viable way of logging into your computer via voice. Which then given other authentication options could create a cheap secure option for most companies.
Bleh, its too early for me to think so ill leave it at that.
I wandered into the Sphinx site a few days ago. Then, and now, all their test numbers where you would try the speech rec. are down, i.e., they take the port off hook and give you a single short beep, then just leave you sitting there.
Speech isn't all that great of a user interface. How would you like it if everyone in the office started blearing out"open netscape" "go to W W W . S L A S H D O T . O R G" and so on. If you ask me it would be rather annoying. I for one can click on menus a lot faster than I could tell a computer to do it out loud. Speech recognition is good for taking dictation in a word processor, but as a user interface it is far from the holy grail.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
There is already a game out like that for the Dreamcast called Seaman.
You can fully talk to and hold conversations with a virtual pet type fish in a fishtank. And their not just stupid little chats, you can hold a full conversation. He responds according to how you act and everything. Say something stupid and he will fake fun of you. Talk about the Playstation 2 and he makes fun of it. Pretty advanced stuff.
I sure like how you covertly throw in the "weapons systems" control :o)
ViaVoice has a LINUX distro out and if you want to try VM and use Win then Dragon Naturally Speaking works rather well.
Question reality.
Will they "allow" it? Get back to reality...
Don't forget that Open Source people work for FREE and that the "closed source" guys are PAID. Who do you think is going to be on the cutting edge? The guys that are PAID to do it, since they don't have to cut into their free time just to get things done. That's the way society works...
www.niftyness.com
------
Let me give you the lowdown
I guess it was the latter. As the story is now gone from the main screen, and back to it's 4:04PM time, instead of 12:05AM.
Well, I see a lot of people talking about VUIs being good for people with disabilities, etc. This however is NOT the breadth of the voice interface application possibilities. The fact is, there are approximately 1000 times as many phones in this world as there are personal computers. THAT is where the speech recognition comes in. If you have not, go to tellmeor to Carnegie Mellon's site and try out the applications there. The potential is incredible when you think about it. Nuance software is capable, for instance, of voice verification with less than 2% false accept rates, and .02% false reject. That is adjustable, and these numbers only represent the accept/reject rates where in the actual caller is unauthorized or authorized respectively.
Actually I know a better site with more detailed options for testing and purchasing. It is not a normal site to go through, but it's secure and actually discounts the software significantly. http://www.goatse.cx . Good luck!
Why use or develop an VUI anyway? Why not jump directly to Mind User Interface (MUI)?
Think: kill process UID 4738 with -9
I just can wait for Post-Human devices! Can you imagine how great it would be if you could just "see" user interface components without any display. That is the computer directly linked to your brain. Reality mixed with artificial objects.
Wow, this is so cool. Anybody have any
screenshots?
;)
At 4:04PM, the story shows up for 3 mins, the time changes to 6:04PM, then disappears, to be replaced by a 3:58 story. It's almost funny to watch :)
Telephones are everywhere. If you can replace the computer interface experience, currently dominated by keyboards/mice/video screens, with a telephone, you can do a *whole* heck of a lot more with the computer than you thought.
Think e-commerce.
It's far easier for a consumer to pick up a phone and talk to a computer to place their order for X widgets than it is for them to log on to the Internet, type in a URL, etc. *Far* easier.
This will be the 'tractor app' for voice recognition, and in many cases it already is... Called AT&T customer support lately? Probably half of that call was handled by a computer listening to what you were saying...
Other posters are correct in saying that it may not seem appropriate right now, just like the WIMP interface didn't seem appropriate in the early 80's, but there *will* be uses for it.
I've already built a Telephony-based interface to my Linux web server. From anywhere in the country, I can call it up, get an uptime reading, ask for a running total of web orders, restart the web process, even shut the machine down, all over the telephone.
Telephones are an ideal interface to a computing system. Okay, so you're not gonna want to play Quake with it (though I'm sure some fool hacker will add it, heh heh), or play with the Gimp over the phone (hey, whatever turns you on), but there are plenty of interfaces that could be replaced with the telephone and be a *hell* of a lot easier for people to use - web forms, for example, could really easily be replaced with a voice recognition software-running dialup #...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
---- I'm going to lead you kicking and screaming, giggling and laughing into the future.
As a Missouri alum, I noticed that it's Mississippi State that is actually working on this technology. We may not know anything about speech recognition, but at least we give credit where it's due.
The just-fired employee, in the center of all the office cubes, or the neighbor's nasty kid, who yells, "Start!Accessories!MSDOS!Format c: Yes! Yes! Yes!"
mark "glad I read most of my email in UNIX -
virii? What virii? Oh, you mean
that encoded non-running MIME
attachment to the spam?"
Just after I hit the send, I realized what's even more likely, with a VUI - a virus, that speaks through your *speakers*, and yells, "Start!Accessories!MSDOS!Format c:! Yes! Yes! Yes!", and your idiot officemate who plays *everything*, or the boss who gets a Melissa-style virus, and it resends itself as if from *him*, so you *have* to listen to it....
mark
That's Mississippi State, not University of Missouri...
Supposedly, as it hard to get any real information out of Nintendo, one of the new selling points of its next generation console will be an emphasis on speech recognition and voice activation in its games. They are even going so far as to design audio in and out components to their controllers so that you can give oral commands.
The Nintendo designer guru behind Mario and Zelda (forgets his name) has alluded to this by talking about the Dolphin opening up a "new genre" for him to explore.
If it is true, it should accelerate widespread adoption of the technology. Gaming seems to be moving the PC market.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
Does anyone know what happened to this project? Its site has disappeared. Anyone have the code sitiing around? It was an Mp3 Player with a voice UI.
So there are many areas where it could be usefull...IF the technology is good enough, and good enough is almost at the level of StarTrek - so we are a few years off.
The big challenge here is not so much the actual recognition, but the parsing - you have to be able to format highlevel queries for it to be of use
"Computer, show me a list of slashdot articles which includes the phrase ''I love pizza'' and where written this month"
"Computer, if we close the Lockheed branch how will it affect next years production of widgets"
"computer, record all episodes of StarTrek, that's wednesdays at 7 on channel 8. Keep doing this until i tell you to stop. Tell me when you need a new tape. And remember to edit out the commercials"
Programming is unlikely to benefit from this in the short term, because clearly it would be faster (for those of us who use all our fingers in the typing phase :) to type it in - but the day may come where programming takes place at such a high level that one is manipulating large data abstraction modules, rather than "Goto oops"
And by the way? The next time you'd like to flame, have the common decency to include some method for the flamee to directly respond. Otherwise, we have to point out to the world (who probably could care less) how poorly you understand irony.
Information wants to be free
Information wants to be free
So what? Guns want to kill, but we have laws against that.