You don't run a constant loop listening to a microphone every minute, because that sucks up the battery like crazy. The Palm programming philosophy says that 99% of the machine's time should be, essentially, idle.
You could either use a walkie-talkie style speak button, or a simple speech detection algorithm that fires up the main recogniser when someone starts speaking.
Everyone has gotten so used to the idea that computers will do exaclty what we tell them. SR will never be 100% reliable (or even 99%) because of the noisy communication medium - air. Therefore you will always need some handy error correction protocol (commonly called dialogue).
Have you ever wondered about how well people recogize speech. If something is blurted out at random we rarely catch the meaning first time. "What?". If humans have a lot of trouble understanding each other (about 20% error rate) then computers have no chance when it comes to out-of-the-box out-of-the-blue dictation. And computers don't have the benefit of a decade of childhood, not to mention millions of years of evolution.
What I'm getting at is that computers need a great deal of context to succeed (to reduce the number of possible interpretations, and therefore the number of ways of getting it wrong).
(I'm speech recogition engineer - our company went bust last year - another dot bomb).
1) the algorithms are good (trust me, i've seen them)
2) the training takes bloody ages - it takes weeks (and tera-bytes of data) to get good results across most of the speaking population.
3) dialogue is very hard.
4) actual recognition is fast (we had dozens of simulateous recognitions on 600Mhz machines).
The take home message: Train the users. Manage expectations. Say bye bye to HAL.
Everyone has gotten so used to the idea that computers will do exaclty what we tell them. SR will never be 100% reliable (or even 99%) because of the noisy communication medium - air. Therefore you will always need some handy error correction protocol (commonly called dialogue).
Have you ever wondered about how well people recogize speech. If something is blurted out at random we rarely catch the meaning first time. "What?". If humans have a lot of trouble understanding each other (about 20% error rate) then computers have no chance when it comes to out-of-the-box out-of-the-blue dictation. And computers don't have the benefit of a decade of childhood, not to mention millions of years of evolution.
What I'm getting at is that computers need a great deal of context to succeed (to reduce the number of possible interpretations, and therefore the number of ways of getting it wrong).
(I'm speech recogition engineer - our company went bust last year - another dot bomb).
1) the algorithms are good (trust me, i've seen them)
2) the training takes bloody ages - it takes weeks (and tera-bytes of data) to get good results across most of the speaking population.
3) dialogue is very hard.
4) actual recognition is fast (we had dozens of simulateous recognitions on 600Mhz machines).
The take home message: Train the users. Manage expectations. Say bye bye to HAL.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely.
Any PDA dictation system would need to have at least 1000 triphones. In total they would use around 20MB.
You don't run a constant loop listening to a microphone every minute, because that sucks up the battery like crazy. The Palm programming philosophy says that 99% of the machine's time should be, essentially, idle.
You could either use a walkie-talkie style speak button, or a simple speech detection algorithm that fires up the main recogniser when someone starts speaking.
Everyone has gotten so used to the idea that computers will do exaclty what we tell them. SR will never be 100% reliable (or even 99%) because of the noisy communication medium - air. Therefore you will always need some handy error correction protocol (commonly called dialogue).
Have you ever wondered about how well people recogize speech. If something is blurted out at random we rarely catch the meaning first time. "What?". If humans have a lot of trouble understanding each other (about 20% error rate) then computers have no chance when it comes to out-of-the-box out-of-the-blue dictation. And computers don't have the benefit of a decade of childhood, not to mention millions of years of evolution.
What I'm getting at is that computers need a great deal of context to succeed (to reduce the number of possible interpretations, and therefore the number of ways of getting it wrong).
(I'm speech recogition engineer - our company went bust last year - another dot bomb).
1) the algorithms are good (trust me, i've seen them)
2) the training takes bloody ages - it takes weeks (and tera-bytes of data) to get good results across most of the speaking population.
3) dialogue is very hard.
4) actual recognition is fast (we had dozens of simulateous recognitions on 600Mhz machines).
The take home message: Train the users. Manage expectations. Say bye bye to HAL.
Everyone has gotten so used to the idea that computers will do exaclty what we tell them. SR will never be 100% reliable (or even 99%) because of the noisy communication medium - air. Therefore you will always need some handy error correction protocol (commonly called dialogue). Have you ever wondered about how well people recogize speech. If something is blurted out at random we rarely catch the meaning first time. "What?". If humans have a lot of trouble understanding each other (about 20% error rate) then computers have no chance when it comes to out-of-the-box out-of-the-blue dictation. And computers don't have the benefit of a decade of childhood, not to mention millions of years of evolution. What I'm getting at is that computers need a great deal of context to succeed (to reduce the number of possible interpretations, and therefore the number of ways of getting it wrong). (I'm speech recogition engineer - our company went bust last year - another dot bomb). 1) the algorithms are good (trust me, i've seen them) 2) the training takes bloody ages - it takes weeks (and tera-bytes of data) to get good results across most of the speaking population. 3) dialogue is very hard. 4) actual recognition is fast (we had dozens of simulateous recognitions on 600Mhz machines). The take home message: Train the users. Manage expectations. Say bye bye to HAL.