Re: voice recognition..?

["Steve Poling" <sdp@xxxxxxx>]

i don't think that assisting the blind is a good application of speech
recognition. one does not need to see in order to type. unless speech
recognition has gotten 10x better than the state i worked with it, you'll
find that it makes errors. it isn't that hard to type and type quite quickly
when one's eyes are closed, so it is conceivable that one who is blind could
learn to typch type. most keyboards have little bumps under the j and f keys
to help one navigate by touch. (note i typed the last couple of sentences
quite quickly with my eyes closed.)

the difficulty will be taking someone who is both blind and not a proficient
typist to the point where he can touch-type. is that less effort than
training a person to use a speech recognition system and learn howto edit
using speech only when the speech recognition is goofing up its assessment
of his utterances.

if you insist upon doing speech recognition you'll want to evaluate the
performance of the best-of-breed systems from Dragon, IBM and L&H on
*whatever* platform they're available. If their performance is inadequate,
then you can be assured that an open source and/or Linux solution will be
inadequate as well. if they do prove adequate, lemme know and i'll see if i
know anything that'll help.

(credentials: i did algorithm development on automatic speech recognition
for a wordspotting system for NSA in the early 80s and then at Lear Seigler
where i helped build the best performing speech recognition system ever to
fly on the AFTI-F16. it was on Nova. there was a time way back when i knew
most of the players in speech.)

just my 2 cents,

steve



-----Original Message-----
From: stuart@i2k.com <stuart@i2k.com>
To: klug@klug.armintl.com <klug@klug.armintl.com>
Date: Saturday, December 04, 1999 12:31 AM
Subject: voice recognition..?


>hello-
> I have a little project that I need to tackle in the near future.
>We are doing some volunteer computer work for the Mel Trotter Mission
>(charity in GR), and have taken on the task of working out a way for a
>blind person to use a computer to dictate notes into.  I think I remember
>seeing something about someone using Emacs with some other software to at
>least read what is on the screen.  This seems like a good start I suppose,
>but is there voice recognition software available for Linux?  I kind of
>doubt it, but having such software free compared to $100+ for Windows
>would be nice, especially since this is for a charity which has little
>extra money.  If anyone has any ideas it would be really nice to hear
>about them before we start investigating the MS side of things...thanks,
>
>ben
>