[RndTbl] Speech recognition

[Mike pfaiffer]

On 11-03-15 12:02 PM, Dan Martin wrote:
> Did you find anything suitable, Mike?

	There are some commercial products which appear to be acceptable for M$ 
and the Mac. Still having hardware problems with my Linux box (going to 
replace my boot drive this evening) so I haven't tried anything there.

> I am interested in speech recognition for the Mac.  I think you
> answered my question about the system speech recognition (limited
> vocabulary).  I am looking for something that could be used with
> software that I write, that would have to have a very large /
> expandable vocablulary.  I don't want to have to cut and paste from
> another app (eg, microsoft word) to my app that I'm going to
> develope.

	The last time I tried the built in speech recognition was with 10.4. I 
haven't tried it with 10.6 yet. With 10.4 you could build up your own 
vocabulary one word at a time. As I mentioned, there is already a 
non-free vocabulary file as an expansion pack. With only a couple of GB 
free on my hard drive I can see where either solution would be a problem.

	Also, since I've recently been told I have a slight French/German 
accent I am somewhat concerned about using an expansion pack.

> Ideally, I would be able to choose the vocabulary and have different
> vocablularies, depending on context.

	I can't speak for the commercial products. However, as I recall the 
built in software allows for only one vocabulary file. I gather it is 
just a simple speech to word translation without context sensitivity. It 
would be nice to have it be a little more intelligent. Specifically 
realising the difference between the up arrow and the word "up".

	The last time I looked, the vocabulary file was a simple structure but 
a pain in the back-side if you wanted to add a lot of words. At first I 
was thinking about catting a dictionary into the file but I didn't have 
one handy and then thought it was a lot of work.

> -Dan

				Later
				Mike


>
> On 2011-02-09, at 11:00 PM, Mike Pfaiffer wrote:
>
>> I've been thinking of something which may make my job as a writer
>> a little easier. The end result is I'd like to bring up Open
>> Office/ Libre Office and dictate what I want into a microphone.
>> This way I can concentrate more on the information and less on the
>> typos.
>>
>> There is some system software which will do this for the Mac (I'd
>> prefer something for Linux) and there are some problems. Namely
>> the small vocabulary and inaccuracy of recognition on some words
>> (eg. Off -->  On). There are a number of commercial products out
>> there but being cheap I'd like something free.
>>
>> A half hour under Google produced a couple of suggestions. Pocket
>> Sphinx and Julius. Both were apparently a little tough to get
>> running and had sparse documentation (at least as of last year).
>> Both are available in the Mint/Ubuntu repositories.
>>
>> Any comments?
>>
>> Later Mike _______________________________________________
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>
> Dan Martin GP Hospital Practitioner Computer Scientist
> ummar143 at shaw.ca (204) 831-1746 answering machine always on
>