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Voice-to-Text Options for Unix?

Posted by Cliff on from the voices-make-a-better-input-device dept.

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.

2 of 20 comments (clear)

  1. There is no Voice Recognition for Linux by Sam+Lowry · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There is a large vocabulary recogniton system, CMU Sphynx at http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/sphinx/

    However, This is probably not exactly what you are looking for as is not (yet?) suitable for Voice Recognition tasks.

    The problem with Voice Recognition is that it has always been a toy for most users and very few of those who buy Voice Recognition software do succeed to make a productivity boost. If you are one of them, you are a lucky guy as you have a good, distinguishable pronunciation, you work in a silent environment and use the mike shipped with the software. Since Unix world has a very practical view on things, I doubt there is many unix people out there that think Voice Recognition can be of use to them.

    Given the laziness of users and lack of training facilities, Voice Recognition is considered to stay an unprofitable buisiness for a long time. You can't even imagine how expensive it is to write a Voice Recognition software and collect the speech data for it...

  2. Re:Specialized Vocabulary... by mdaniel · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I have followed Lojban for quite some time now and I think that it, or something like it, represents the future of human-computer voice interaction. It is parseable and phonetically spelled, making it very computer friendly.

    This does not beat the problem you brought up about Joe User, but for someone whose profession depends upon interaction with computers, learning a new way of typing (dvorak), writing (Graffiti) or speaking (Lojban) is a small price to pay. It even lends itself more toward the model of Shadowrunish futures where computer professionals are almost a separate race. :-)