Is Speech Recognition Finally 'Good Enough'?

jcatcw writes "Speech recognition software is fast, but it still may not be accurate enough. Clerical jobs usually ask for 40 wpm, but speech recognition software can keep up with someone speaking at 160 wpm. In Lamont Wood's demo it did very well at too/two/to and which/witch, but will it still render 'I really admire your analysis' as "I really admire urinalysis'? At 95% accuracy, people aren't jumping on the bandwagon. Wood's typing speed is about 60 wpm with 93% accuracy, so he found that using speech recognition was about twice as fast as typing. Those who type at hunt-and-peck speeds will experience results that are even more dramatic. There's really only one product on the US market: Dragon NaturallySpeaking from Nuance Communications. The free versions from Microsoft aren't up to the task and IBM sold ViaVoice to Nuance, where it's treated as an entry-level product."

Comments

Hmmm....

[DoofusOfDeath]

Is Speech Recognition Finally 'Good Enough'?

Is spinachry ignition rivaly gooery stuff? What the hell are you talking about?

This comment written by MS speech recognition

[TodMinuit]

Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all.

No.

[Caspian]

Speech recognition, handwriting recognition, species recognition... all of these suck, and will CONTINUE to suck, until strong AI is developed.

And by that time, there will be a lot more important problems to worry about than making a computer understand Bubba Sixpack who can't type-- such as keeping the robots from taking over the planet in a bloody war.

Of course it's good enough

[ral315]

I use it myself. It's wonder full. delete that. delete that. delete that. double the killer delete select all

"New Directions"

[parvenu74]

I used to work for a company that has the words "new directions" in their name. When I told people where I worked I would make a rather long pause between the "new" and "directions" so as not to sound like I was saying something else. I wonder how this software would render it...

Re:"New Directions"

[TrippTDF]

Reminds me of when the company "Pen Island" or "Mole Station Nursery" set up their domain names...

Re:"New Directions"

[houghi]

You though you had problems with "new directions"
Can you imagine telling the software to go to this site?
haatch tee tee pee double point slash slash slash dot dot org.
http:///..org not found

Pretty good

[Richard McBeef]

95 percent is pretty good, only one word in twenty. I wouldn't have a problem with a 5% error ate.

Re:Not Useful for Coders

[Tackhead]

> "Set v underscore tab equals space parenthesis parenthesis x minus lev schema dot all recs concatenate..."

Yeah, but if you put a beat to it, you've got something.

{ } . ! /
& ; ^ # -
< > @ \
{ } _ SYSTEM HALTED

"Left titty, right titty, dot bang slash.
Ampersand semicolon, caret pound dash.
Less than greater than, at back slash,
left titty, right titty, under score crash!"

* # ! ! (
~ & | )
' " . . DEL
# ^G ! ! working... done.

"Star pound bang bang, open-paren.
Tilde and pipe, close-paren.
One quote, two quote, dot dot delete,
pound bell, bang bang, process complete!"

Google's USENET archive dates it back to 1990, but it predates the 1990 post ("Stuck Shift Key Poetry") to rec.humor.funny by several years.

You haven't lived until you've seen a dozen drunken geeks trying to sing "Waka Waka", or the entirety of "Hatless Atlas", while seeing only one character at a time. Well, maybe you have, but this is Slashdot.