Slashdot Mirror
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."
Speech recognition did not come installed with my Windows XP, but was installed (and turned 'on' by default) by my Office XP Pro. After which point my computer suffered a major decrease in speed, to the point where it was taking 15 seconds sometimes for the webbrowser to load. I current have a 1.2 Ghz Athlon T-bird with 512 M ram, so it obviously was not from lack of processing power. Then I noticed a little program running the background called 'sapisrv.exe', turned it off, and was back to cruising speed. Perhaps this slowness was just something I experienced due to some oversight, or maybe I need to upgrade (again), but if not I would not suggest anyone to use the MS speech recog. tool (of course, with the /. crowd that is probably inherent)
Random noise. Random crap inserted in the RAM or buffers somewhere.
Voice rec is not exact, it involves algorithms to interpret sounds (noise) coming in the mic and convert it into what it THINKS the word was. Noise is the key here. It is (possibly) interpreting random system noise (or leaking EM?) inside the box as words.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
There was a team at IBM that did some research on speech systems 5 years ago. They found that most dictation software created these phantom words when various noises in the environment were recognized. They called it "recognoise."
Apparently, even with decent unidirectional microphones, people who are trying to use speech software run into these problems...