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Using PDAs for Dictation?
SunPin asks: "I'm a writer that is 99% dependent, due to fine-motor disabilities, on voice dictation. I've been a dictation user since 1990. My preference is 'discrete' speech because of very low resource consumption and its effectively infinite flexibility. Over the years, my computer use has de-evolved to programming, FTP, email (Mozilla), word processing (OpenOffice) and Ricochet. Drop the game and there's nothing that I shouldn't be allowed to do on the go. The problem is that I can't. Back in 1990, the requirements for IBM VoiceType were: DOS, 8MB RAM, 10MB of drive space with one of those new-fangled scorching 386-16MHz processors... not exactly demanding by today's standards and, unless I'm outright wrong, not demanding by today's PDA standards. Why hasn't it occurred yet?"
"In the disability offices of the hundreds of universities across the US, such software would be a major money saver because not all students need a high-powered laptop. While natural speech is great from a marketing perspective, it is simply impractical for general use and cannot adapt to mildly noisy environments. IBM, L & H and Microsoft have all given me the run-around. IBM refused to entertain the possibility. L & H is on life support, in a deep coma. Only Microsoft had a remotely positive response saying that they were testing natural recognition in Mandarin Chinese in their Beijing research office. Does anyone believe in keeping it simple, anymore?"
IBM can't even manage to do this on, for example, a P3 733EB. How they're going to do it on a 300MHz XScale or SH chip or similar (let alone a Motorola Dragonball) is beyond me. I think your head is in the clouds.
With that said, voice recognition is very much on everyone's minds and it is coming. The limiting factor in handhelds right now is battery technology, which seems to be advancing more rapidly now than it has been in the last decade or so. With more power density comes faster processors and more ram, and the ability to perform these kinds of operations on smaller computers.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Dragon has a portable product that you dock to your PC to do the voice to text. You can bring it with you, then connect it when you're home. A digital recorder is available bundled with the software, or you can use any micro cassett recorder and a Norcom playback and interface device. Seach Google for info!
With a simple search for dictaphone I was able to find a product called EXSpeech. I think this is what you are looking for.
You can get a version of ViaVoice for the PocketPC. However, it sucks. It's not a real dictation system though- it only allows you do use a pretty small pre-defined group of commands, not general english word dictation. I was pretty disapointed. However, I wouldn't be surprised if eventually there will be a full-blown ViaVoice Embedded version for the PocketPC.
As usual, there are some results that come up with a simple Google search.
There was a Dragon Naturally Speaking beta for the Newton OS 2.1, and it works OK. But it's still a beta and is far from perfect.
If you're looking for voice recognition for other PDAs, including PalmOS or Linux devices, you'll probably have much less luck.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Only recently have PDA's been shipping with anything approaching a good DAC and many PDAs still lack any ADC support. Without a good Analogue to Digital convertor built into the PDA you won't be able to do voice recognition. Remember that your 386 still required a soundcard to work properly. The same is true for PDAs today.
Since the asker wanted to know WHY nobody has done this yet, I'll spell it out:
Basically the major pitfalls to developing this are: :)
1) Crappy algorithms that mangle what you really said into something unrelated
2) Power Consumption
3) Interfacing to the PDA (not hard to do, but non-trivial)
4) Limited PDA capabilities (Remember that Palm's DragonBall is a RISC architecture, and things like speech recognition NEED floating point math which must be emulated)
The solutions:
1) Somebody (not unlike me...) has to code the already existing better algorithms (check the literature - speech recognition is a mature technology, and publications abound) into a usable chunk of code, instead of simply recycling ViaVoice or NaturallySpeaking's libraries.
2) Add more battery storage.
3) Use another processor to do the conversion, then simply write it to the Palm in a serial stream.
I would just wait about a year, then ask that question again to your physician friends, and see what they whip out of their pockets... :)
Lo, many years ago I had a lot of luck with EARS on my 66MHz 486. It's a very simple discrete trainable recogniser; you have to teach it every word before it would recognise it. But it was fast then, it should be really fast now, and was pretty decent for recognising simple commands.
and it also has 8k of storage! You could store all of "Hel" on that thing
Some mics do this mechanically also - They have a port on the reverse side of the mic element so it only detects pressure differences between the two sides of the mic, i.e. only nearby sounds coming from one side of the mic (your mouth). Plantronics has plenty of these - Such NC headsets are common thanks to cellular telephone handsfree kits being required by law in some states, and they are quite good. (I love my Plantronics headset.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Since it doesn't look too promising I think you may want to expand your search beyond PDAs. I saw several references to the linux based simputer, maybe one of those with Linux based speech-to-text software is the way to go?
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