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IBM, TrollTech Integrate Linux Voice Recognition
Paladin128 writes: "Talk about cool technology. Linux may get widespread voice recognition before Windows, as this article mentions that IBM's ViaVoice will be bundled with Qt, and allow the programmers to use BNF to create parsing rules, and bid voice input directly to Qt components via Qt signals and slots. This level of integration evidently wasn't possible with Win32, thus there were performance issues. And since Qt is open source, the GNOME people could easilly find a way to integrate this technology into GTK+. Between adding voice to the handicapped accessability list, offering KDE in more languages than Windows is available in (I don't use GNOME so I can't comment on how it's doing here), and more customization than Windows can ever hope to offer (such as choice of desktops), Linux could really make some waves this year." Just don't mention "rm -rf" when you're near the microphone ...
I see a number of postings here to the effect that voice recognition, especially for dictation, will be largely useless. The problem is that these postings are considering the use of voice recognition as a replacement for typing within the current crop of user interfaces.
The true power of voice recognition is not in replacing the keyboard. It comes with allowing new forms of interaction with a computer. Consider the simple task of checking the weather. Pulling up a browser and heading to weather.com is no big task, but why would I want to sit at my computer and have to do that just so I can decide how heavy a sweater I'll need for the day? Why not just ask the computer to read me the forecast while I'm getting dressed?
Many people would assume in this scenario that one would call out: "Computer, browse to h t t p colon slash slash w w w dot weather dot com. Read page." How about simply calling a script intead that does all the hard work behind the scenes? "Computer, what is the weather forecast for today?" The use of predefined grammars, as the article describes, will make such queries very reliable as they will be much easier to recognize.
This may have been a simple example, but hopefully it gets the point across. Voice recognition is not going to replace typing. As many have said, some people can type much faster than they can dictate text. Once you start considering higher level interaction with the computer, however, the situation changes, and voice recognition systems will really show their colors.
-kris