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Windows XP is Listening
jfengel writes: "According to Newsbytes, some Windows XP users are finding random words inserted into their text as they write. The problem is caused by XP's speech recongition system, which is turned on by default by some manufacturers. It's listening to the random noise you get even when the mic is turned off. Kind of an insight into your computer's subconscious, perhaps."
It happens even when the mic is disconneted, and some of the manufacturers turn it on by default so you don't even know it's on... Basically you get a new computer with no mic and words start appearing. What are you supposed to think?
Fucking retard anon AC's... (yep, that includes me. But at last I factually correct instead of being an ignorant fucking retarded illiterate AC).
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.NET Speech homepage is http://www.microsoft.com/speech/.
'Phantom Menace' typing just a Microsoft speech feature
By Brian McWilliams, Newsbytes.
March 12, 2002
Random words and characters mysteriously appearing on the screens of some Windows XP and Office XP users are not the work of phantom hackers or a sign that users' systems are possessed by demons. It's just Microsoft's voice recognition system running slightly amok, the company said.
In recent weeks, several XP users have posted messages to Internet discussion lists and newsgroups reporting that text is automatically appearing in Internet Explorer's address bar or in Outlook e-mail messages or Word documents as users compose them.
In a posting entitled "My Remote Keyboard is Possessed in XP," for example, one Microsoft customer reported "very strange behavior" that included letters appearing in input areas of the screen while browsing and writing e-mails.
"I'm afraid Holy Water would short it out so someone please help me," wrote the XP user.
Another Microsoft customer separately reported that "a ghost" appeared to be taking over his computer. In the message, entitled "Phantom Menace XP," the user said something was causing toolbars and options to pop up without his input.
In response to user inquiries, in January Microsoft published a handful of articles in the Support section of its Web site about the problem.
According to Microsoft, after installing Microsoft's Speech application programming interface, "random words or characters may be displayed in Office XP documents or in the Internet Explorer Address bar."
The company said the behavior occurs because "the speech recognition tool is 'listening' to your voice through you computer's microphone and is attempting to recognize what you are saying."
Microsoft said its speech recognition engine, a program file named Sapisvr.exe, is turned on at installation by some computer manufacturers. The engine is also included with Microsoft Office XP and other speech-enabled products.
To resolve the problem, Microsoft said XP users should disable the Dictation and the Voice Command features on the operating system's Language bar. Alternately, users can turn off speech recognition completely from the Regional and Language Options tool on XP's Control Panel.
Merely unplugging or turning off the computer's microphone does not correct the random-character problem, according to several user reports.
Microsoft's article about random characters in Office XP is at http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb
Microsoft's article on configuring speech recognition in Windows XP is at http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb
Microsoft's
Reported by Newsbytes, http://www.newsbytes.com.
Consultancy: If you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made in prolonging the problem
Disconnect your mic, leave it turned on, and turn your system volume way up....and listen to all the static and noise still being generated by all those wonderfull little electrical fields interacting all over the inside of your case.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
If this article contained an editorial comment by timothy saying something like "Boy Microsoft sucks! They are morons to have let this happen!" then your post might actually have a point. However:
1) The article has no editorial comments.
2) The user-submitted blurb specifically says that this is only the problem in some manufacturer's configuration, therefore placing blame on the manufacturers, not Microsoft.
3) For those not running XP, this is an amusing article as people with imaginations are able to think up many humurous consequences that might stem from this little problem.
4) For those running XP, it is informative because they might have been seeing these problems and been unaware of what was causing it.
Thank you, knee-jerk, come again.
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What is the sound of this sentence?
Speech recognition is extremely CPU and memory intensive by its very nature. Depending on the vocabulary size and the complexity of the language model used (a language model is a statistical model that gives you the probability of a word given the previous N words in the sentence), most research code uses 200-400 Mb of memory and needs really fast CPUs to achieve real time recognition. Although I figure MS has a bag of heuristics up their sleeves theres only so much trickery you can do before the error rate becomes useless.
Anyway, ASR is pretty useful for some people and as long as nothing else needs your RAM and CPU I dont think MS' system should be much worse in terms of resource demands than e.g. IBMs ViaVoice.
However, turning on speech recognition by default really tells you that the people selling these preinstalled machines really don't know what they're doing.