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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?"
I think it has more to do with the perception of voice dication as unreliable and resource intensive rather than any actual fact, as the poster points out, it can be done fairly cheaply.
I have not had much experience, but I think the other thing is that people are averse to any sort of training or teaching required, no matter the long term dividents.
Like most things, it comes down not to fact, but to perception and prejuidice. Most people base their buying decisions on 30-second spots, not informed research, so the cost of educating people to is too high for producers to incur.
It's the other, most overlooked piece of hardware used in speech recognition, the microphone. The junky headset given away with ViaVoice or the el cheapo unit sold in Radio Shack for under $10 makes most people's experiences with voice recognition software less than favorable. Invest in a $50-$60 professional headset and the ability of the software to accurately detect your speech patterns improves dramatically. How are they going to shoe horn a high fidelity audio sound processor in there? Maybe a USB headset might be the answer assuming the device can accept USB devices.
I'm also going to assume that the current line of speech recognition products are MUCH better than what ran on your old 386.
Basically, they are working to analyze speech in slices (phonemes) instead of the more computationally intensive task of the whole word. This would lead to a higher success rate and could be easily used across multiple accents of the same language (English, engrish, etc).
I'm excited about what they could accomplish there.
-Cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
I worked on dictation and dialogue on a PDA prototype at MS several years ago. It was called MiPad and was pretty cool. Well except that it really had to use a wireless network to a computer to get the recognition done.
There are a couple of reasons why this hasn't hit the market yet:
1) the PDAs really are not powerful enough to do decent recognition. Mainly, they don't have good enough audio input systems for reasonable speech quality. Also not enough disk space for dictionary storage. And the cpus are slow and the RAM is too low.
2) at least at MS it is not a top priority to make speech work for disabled users. Outrageous you say? Not so! Turns out when the speech guys approached the accessability guys on the subject, they learned that speech recognition is not workable in most cases where accessability is needed; that is to say, the market for disabled people who cannot use the keyboard but who CAN use speech input is actually quite small. Most people who don't have the motor function to type (or use some sort of keyed input like Stephen Hawking has) dont have the motor function to speak clearly enough for speech recognition to work. Bottom line: other solutions work better.