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?

Problems

[Tribbin]

As a foreigner it is really hard to get the pronounciation right enough.

Also command execution by others in the room is a problem.

How about listening to music, or TV, and having the computer interpreting it.

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...

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.

Maybe the question should be...

[Mahjub Sa'aden]

Instead of asking if speech recognition is "good enough", maybe we should be asking whether or not it's actually useful for anything in the first place. I mean, is it good enough... to do what?

Can you imagine being in a cubicle farm full of people talking to their computers? Or trying to talk to your computer on the bus? You have to imagine that as computers become more ubiquitous, input methods will have to adjust alongside, and I simply can't see (or hear) speech recognition doing that very well.