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Are You Talking to Your PC Yet?
An anonymous reader writes "If you have ever asked "Do those speech-to-text apps like Dragon NaturallySpeaking and IBM ViaVoice really work?" Pocket PC Addict has posted a detailed review of Dragon Naturally Speaking for Pocket PC and Desktop machines. It is written from the perspective of someone who has been burned by speech to text software in the past and had vowed to never try one of these apps again. It is encouraging for slow typists who would like to use their voice to write. Plus it details some valuable tips for using it with Pocket PCs."
So if I ask Clippy to STFU, will he?
OS X has really good system wide integration for Voice commands. and the voice interpreter is pretty good for one that comes with the OS, but I could not get it to work consistently....
:-) (when it worked)
other than that I thought it was cool to say "computer give me brad's number" and it would display my buddy brad's phone number on the screen
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Any recommended ones? http://sourceforge.net/projects/cmusphinx/
I know what's on your hard dr
All though Text two speach is a grape gnu technology it is not red E for the main stream yet.
My Accent screws up everything. I hate my Accent.
The problem I always found with uuhhhhh voice writing was mmmmm filtering out unwanted noises and shhhhh distractions from my posts period return But I uhh guess they've fixed most of those burp problems by now right question mark
-Teiresias
Is anyone out there giving any thought to how a programming language should be structured to make it easy to code using a speech recognition engine?
If not, why not?
It walks just fin four mee!
apterous.org
I've been talking to my PC for years:
You god damned son of a bitch! F'n Piece of shit!
My brother and I work at a company making efficiency programs... for awhile we toyed with the idea of having all of the programs activated by voice... we tested it out for awhile with an open source cantation originally used for games, that would execute a command, or type text based on what you said... for a while, it was awesome, every time we said something, it'd find the word from our list, and activate the program... problem was, when it listened to your voice, it only compared it to the words you had programs assigned to... so if you had four words, no problem, but if you had 60, it started choosing horribly... we eventually had to scrap the program all together... though it was funny watching what programs it would have to run through when I started cursing in frustration... I'm pretty sure the annoyance of people talking to their computers all over the building would have caused problems as well.
WANNAWIKI Wannawiki WannaWiki WANNAWIKI!
Do not run webservers on PocketPCs even if you are an addict
And mine works just fine. Submit. Submit. I said submit. Why isn't this expletivedeleted thing triggering the submit button. Submit! Submit! Damn it, I have to move the mouse.
___ In the words of Gen. Douglas McArthur: "I'll be right back."
bracket en slash tee close bracket
Mirror
1. It's awkward to talk when you're trying to compose something that requires a lot of thought first. I usually like to talk to myself (either out-loud or in my head) and type out what I'm thinking in a more formal fashion.
2. It is very tedious to go back and edit or make corrections. If I make an error while typing, I'm cognizant of the error very soon after it happens. With voice recognition, techincally "someone else" is typing and it takes more time to see where the mistakes were made.
3. I deal with lots of boilerplate text with original content intermingled. A lot of times working on such a text becomes an editing process where using the keyboard & mouse is more efficient.
4. My voice doesn't last for much longer than 30 minutes for non-stop speaking...and that's with short breaks for water.
Conclusion: Just hire a hot secretary that can type.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
I'll be happy when someone codes a DWIM method (Do What I mean):)
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
...it worked OK as long as you trained it properly and you had a nice quite room and a good mic. However, there are issues with "voice typing" that can't be overlooked. Primary is security. If you want to type a document or e-mail that contains sensitive data, make damn sure that no one can hear you. My bank recently moved to a voice activated system. I'm surprised they haven't gotten a ton of complaints from people since it REQUIRES you to say your SS# and PIN out loud. This means I can no longer check my account from my cell phone or at work. If you sit down and think about how many things you type that you would never want to say out loud, you can see why voice typing hasn't taken off. Imagine this emanating from your cubicle in a monotone:
;P
"http://www.goat.cx/ Take that you bukkake loving lunixtards."
Your co-workers would think you were a nutjob if they saw half of what you posted as AC to Slashdot.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I don't have enough experience with iListen or ViaVoice for my opinion on them to matter, but I found the built-in speech recognition for 10.2 and 10.3 to be more annoying than anything else. It would work just often enough for me to think it was doing its job, but fail just often enough to be a consistent pain in the ass. I'm looking forward to the complete rewrite in 10.4, aka VoiceOver. Here's the apple hype page for it: http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/voiceover.html.
If you get nervous, just remember that there are a few billion other people who don't really give a damn.
But then again, you have never seen pure aluminum...well, 99% of the population has never seen pure aluminum, it oxidies instantly. There are some methods for observation, but it's mostly not worth it, besides, pure aluminum looks mostly just like aluminum oxide.
I have used Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional for many years, and ViaVoice before that. ViaVoice's recognition was not so great, and the program crashed constantly. Dragon works very well. I can do around 140-150 wpm with it. I seem to have to make 1-2 corrections per sentence, sometimes less. I am using Dragon 7, but there is a new version (8) out now. I highly recommend this program if you have repetitive stress injuries, or would like to avoid developing them.
I use the text-to-speech on several crontab entries. Chip (yes, that's the computer's name) will announce basic daily schedule items, such as the date in the morning, kid's bedtime, and a final signoff at 11pm. I added some checks so it wouldn't talk whenever iDVD or iTunes was running. I used to have it monitor news headlines too, but it would talk too often and we would tune it out.
I also tried some "Speakable Items" for basic tasks. Essentially, there is a special folder with a number of AppleScript files. The filenames are their voice triggers. If the computer hears you say one of those filenames, it runs the AppleScript. There are nested directories with items for specific applications, so you can speak the global commands or the active app's specific commands. Well thought-out.
Some Speakable Items could come in handy, but the eMac microphone is too limited to be able to command the machine from across the room. You also cannot have a set of Speakable Items somewhere which are still active when nobody's logged in. Thus, I need to have a user logged in (and then turned away with user switch). Lastly, for most of the automation tasks I'd like to run, Perl or Bash is a better choice than AppleScript, but Speakable Items must be special text-command files or AppleScript, and I can't imagine making a bunch of AppleScript stubs for each Unix-style script I would write. These each limit the usefulness of the voice-commandable appliance I was hoping for.
On the utility side, speech command would be great for specific queries, "Chip, what day is it?" and generic countdowns: "Chip, give me ten!" and he'll tell you when ten minutes have elapsed.
[
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
IMHO, the problem with this kind of engines is that they don't make a separation between speech to phoneme / phoneme to text.
:-/ )
If someone designs a good open source speech to phoneme architecture, I'm sure people would start working on phoneme to text AI algorithms.
They say: "Open source? Death!!! Where will our revenues for research go?"
But... what use is patenting/selling something that doesn't work in the first place?
Again, this is only my personal opinion. (I couldn't RTFA because... *slashdotted*
I've played with the speech recognition that came with my tablet PC. Works OK if I'm by myself in a quiet room where I can non-self-conciously talk unusually loud-n-clear. Every time I've demo'ed it to people, in an office environment talking normally, the results are laugable.
:-)
The good news is, you can play "Telephone" all by yourself! Remember that game where you sat in a circle, and one person says a sentence to the person next to him, and he tells the next person, and so on all around the circle, and then you hear the final version? Just talk to your computer, then when your words are shown (incorrectly) on the screen, read those words back, and so on. Easier and more fun than going from german to french to english to spanish to french to german to english in babelfish.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I've been using voice for about 6 months. I had a big issue with right hand pain this year so I talked to a fellow developer who helped me get setup. We've done some custom grammars in python for or dev environment. It's been helpful. It's a long way to go if you want to reduce mouse usage. The mouse has to be the worst peripheral for the PC. I'm considering buying the SmartNav http://www.naturalpoint.com/smartnav/ to get rid of my mouse. I've messed with one on a PC with 2 screens. It was nice.
I tried iListen when my wife was having difficulty typing. I ran through the training and played with it a bit to get familiar with it prior to having her use it. The accuracy rate was very high for me.
Then she tried to use it. Even the training procedure was difficult for her. She grew up in the midwest and had no discernable accent, so that wasn't the problem. Near as I could determine, she didn't always have the same inflection when saying many words. Without the consistency of pronunciation, the software couldn't learn correctly. She became very frustrated, which led to her over-enunciating the word in question, which just confused the software even more. It became shelfware.
I dragged it out a month ago and started using it again. I've gotta say, the response time on a Dual-G5 is pretty impressive. And for the smartasses out there; no, I'm not using it for this post, I'm at work. Isn't that where everyone reads slashdot?
I've been working recently on a language I call 'verbal'. My goal initially was a language I could use in the car, while driving. (I love to code.)
I realized that such a language would be useful for blind people and anyone who couldn't type.
The target is a language that will mimic a subset of English, so that a program might be:
I've written a compiler that translates that kind of thing into C, but I'm not releasing it just yet. It only has the type int, and no functions or objects. As soon as it can handle objects, I'll post it quietly.
(I got stuck for a day doing an elegant itoa.c, but that's done now. All I needed it for was to generate good labels for constants on the symbol table, and sprintf didn't fit right. Of course I found a slightly simpler one after I got it done.)
sigs, as if you care.
How perceptive!
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
Nat (the Ximian dude) recently hurt himself and has been reduced to being a one-handed typist. In order to stay connected, he's hired someone to take dictation for him. In today's blog entry he talks about the experience, what it's like for a very competent typist to use a dictation system, and thinks aloud about future intelligent speech-to-text applications.
I'm supporting users in a medical environment with Dragon 7. Getting the right microphones made all the difference. We went from an average 96% to 98-99% efficiency just by spending ~$200 on Sennheiser headset microphones and Andrea USB sound pods from these folks.
Not affiliated, just a happy user - thanks for getting the MDs off my back!