Comments on: So what’s the state of speech recognition and dictation software?

By: Nicholas Bedworth, CTO, DigitalDirect Development Corporation

Nicholas Bedworth, CTO, DigitalDirect Development Corporation — Fri, 16 May 2008 02:00:18 +0000

During the past few days, I’ve been increasing my usage of SR in Vista, and the results are encouraging. A boom microphone is essential (a Bluetooth-connected earset won’t work) and a reasonably quiet environment is needed (loud noises from outside such as bird songs (!) don’t help).

Anyway, because the Vista SR is part of the OS, it seems to have knowledge of all the special words, names, etc., in ones documents, contacts, and so forth. This radically reduces training. For ordinary conversation recognition, it does very well, and it sure beats typing. If it mis-identifies a word, the correct word is almost always found on the pop-up menu of alternates.

Not perfect, but impressive. Training is quite short, perhaps 15 minutes. And it also gives good control over the desktop, once again, not perfectly, but it’s a whole lot better than typing.

By: Stephen L Reed

Stephen L Reed — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 18:02:24 +0000

Hi. I’ve used the open source Java research software Sphinx-4, which performs automatic speech recognition. I get about 5% - 10% error rate on my large vocabulary evaluations. It does not have a facility for training. And its not really an end-user product but it can be incorporated easily into Java applications.

See: http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/html/cmusphinx.php

-Steve

Stephen L. Reed

Artificial Intelligence Researcher
http://texai.org/blog
http://texai.org
3008 Oak Crest Ave.
Austin, Texas, USA 78704
512.791.7860

By: Curt Monash

Curt Monash — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 05:21:57 +0000

Per Wikipedia, Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 came out in mid-2006, and doesn’t require training. Does anybody know whether there are other significant enhancements in Version 9? And is the no-training claim really true?

CAM

By: Linda Barlow

Linda Barlow — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 05:02:57 +0000

Unfortunately, I don’t have Vista.

I used the Word program a few years ago, and found it pretty annoying. Despite long hours of “training,” the errors when I dictated were legion. I know writers who use Dragon, and love it, but the version they’re using is several years old. Does anyone know if Dragon has a recent update?

Thanks.

–Linda

By: Martin Griffies

Martin Griffies — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 21:23:11 +0000

The MS product is also downloadable for XP / Word 2003, or you may already have it.
It’s only for US English, Chinese, Japanese.

By: Curt Monash

Curt Monash — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 19:53:49 +0000

Thanks, Steve.

I’ve chickened out and haven’t run Vista so far, despite Microsoft’s blandishments.

CAM

By: Steve Hochschild

Steve Hochschild — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 15:21:26 +0000

If you have Vista you don’t need to get Dragon. Just go to the accessibility menu and turn on the speech recognition that is included in the OS. It is very good, and is both free and immediate, just a few clicks and a training session away…

Thanks!
steveh

By: Bill Burke

Bill Burke — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 08:34:33 +0000

.
Hi Curt,

Speech recognition in general, is gaining ground as an ubiquitous technology almost daily..

And Windows Vista offers dictation, and Command and Control that’s previously unheard of!

Here’s an article that may help you get a better picture:

http://wirelessspeech.blogspot.com/2007/12/speech-recognition-top-10-flop-says.html

Bill Burke
http://wirelessspeech.blogspot.com
.