Voice-to-Text Options for Unix?

fingerLess asks: "I recently got pushed over the edge in keyboard use. I use Linux and wanted to find a good voice-to-text solution I can use on Linux on my laptop. It seems the IBM ViaVoice I found was still at 1.0 and there was even some questions if it was still available. But if it isn't being worked on, is it worth it? Has anyone tried any voice products running on top of one of the win-virtual machines and had had any success? My experience with those indicate top much of a performance hit in the AV department (AV seems not to be a real high priority with such products aimed at business or 'Office' productivity). Ideas?" For a while there, it looked like speech recognition was progressing at a pretty good clip, especially with Big Blue leading the charge. However I haven't heard of anything revolutionary happening with this technology for the past 2 years. Did I miss something, or has voice recognition on the desktop lagged.

Comments

Specialized Vocabulary...

[NOT-2-QUICK]

In my view, one the primary obstacles that has yet to be overcome in the wonderful world of voice recognition (regardless of OS) is the specialized vocabulary that is required by the recognition software. By this, I am specifically referring the word syntax that the interface requires to achieve optimum performance.

While we have all seen the world quite capably adapt to the Palm-Graffiti style of hand writing recognition, many vendors have found it to be a much more formidable task to modify the manner in which people speak. Beyond the several language variations (languages, accents, lisps, etc...), developers must also take into consideration much more subtle disparities in speech such as separate dialects within a given language. This has caused quite an immense dilemma, one that has prevented the mainstreaming of such technology!!!

Even in the case of software such as Via Voice, the user is still given to the quite arduous task of creating a "dictionary" of sorts that recognizes their specific speech patterns and verbiage tendencies.

All of these factors lead to complications and idiosyncrasies that the average Joe User is unwilling or unable to accept!!!