Ask Slashdot: Is There a Useful Voice-Activated PC? (dailycaring.com)

An anonymous reader writes: My elderly monther-in-law misses her computer. Her mind is okay, but she cannot use a computer because of her Parkinson's disease.

I am not all that impressed with Amazon Echo. Seems you can ask the Echo for the time of day, or the weather outside, but it will not do anything useful -- like send an email. A voice controlled PC would be great, even if it only did a few simple tasks.
The original submission ends with a question: "Is there such a thing?" So leave your best thoughts and suggestions in the comments. Is there a useful voice-activated PC?

Comments

Any PC or Mac with a microphone.

[damnbunni]

Windows since XP and MacOS since like... 9.0 have included voice assistive technologies.

You just have to turn them on.

If the OS's built in speech recognition and control don't do what you want, buy a copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

Re:Any PC or Mac with a microphone.

[scdeimos]

The problem is people in general are lazy and do not want to spend the time needed to train the system for each person so we need the raw power of powerful servers to do general voice processing.

We actually don't, you know.

Anyone using Siri can tell you that the local phone screen already displays the text of your query while it's going off to ask Apple's servers what to do, and still displays it when it comes back with "Oops, we seem to be having communication problems. Please try again later."

In other words the speech-to-text conversion has already happened on the phone. Apple's servers are just applying Natural Language Processing techniques on the text to figure out what the request means. This is also something that could happen on the phone, Apple just wants a view into everyone's lives.

iPad, Siri and accessibility features

[k2r]

An iPad with proper accessibility settings and Siri voice recognition.
Iâ(TM)m not a native speaker and Siri does understand me well enough to write proper emails and messages.

https://www.abilitynet.org.uk/...

Tremor Cancellation

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a direct answer, but perhaps helpful -- there is some promising work being done with tremor compensation/cancellation technology. Strap on a bracelet with a type of vibrator attached and it can stabilize your hand movements, kind of like camera stabilization does for taking pictures.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/projects-backed-by-google-and-microsoft-are-tackling-parkinsons-disease/

Best suggest would be to work with Blind organizat

[oxnyx]

Having spent a certain amount of time with disability offices I suggest that you go and find a local Blind Association and see if they can allow her to test out some of the software written for blind people. Jaws is a software that allows you too hear in one ear what's on the screen and what you're typing in the other ear might be more difficult than your mother-in-law can manage. The other thing is that this will probably help her get access two other entertainments such as audio books and people in a similar condition to commiserate. What you're looking for is probably not an out-of-the-box solution sold at the General Market but something you're going to find it's a little more expensive but there's probably a grant for it.

Dragon/dragonfly

[arnott]

You can train your PC to do that. I use dragon naturally speaking with dragonfly python scripting. There are many python libraries which are built on dragonfly, which do the job.

Caster is a good one. Check these tutorials.

You will need to spend some time to understand how things work and train your mother-in-law to use the customized voice commands.

Search for "dragon naturally speaking demo" on YouTube to see what others do.