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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.
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...
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!!!
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