Voice Recognition for Linux

[Chris Hayes]

Thanks or the feedback Eric. Is it really this hopeless? You talked about
the Sphinx projects being okay - but not ready for normal users. To what
extent are they capable? I'd really love to know if you or anyone else has
tried them.

I have looked into them but haven't had the time (and not being a very
capable technical user) to get them going, orto get them going nicely. If I
knew how well they worked, I'd probably be more inclined to use the time I
don't have getting them working.

Chris Hayes


On 19/02/07, Eric S. Johansson <esj at harvee.org> wrote:
>
> Chris Hayes wrote:
> > Hi - I was wondering whether anyone here might know about what voice
> > recognition software is currently available for Linux.
>
> (warning, I am an unrepentant curmudgeon and negative filter.  Interpret
> the following accordingly.  If I'm wrong on any points, and someone
> wants to correct me, I will gladly learn.)
>
> In a nutshell, not much.  Sphinx 4, and others of its family, you have
> some fairly decent recognition systems.  However, they are not ready for
> prime time because if they were, people would be using them for desktop
> recognition.  while the recognition engines may work well, a lot of the
> ancillary pieces such as training, dealing with microphone switching,
> dictionary management etc. are not quite there yet.  On the other hand,
> the same shortcomings can be laid at the feet of Linux and Windows audio
> subsystems.
>
> from my perspective, the only usable speech recognition for end users is
> naturally speaking.  There may be something on a Macintosh but I don't
> have any experience there.  The reason I say NaturallySpeaking is the
> only usable one is because it's a large vocabulary continuous speech
> recognition system people used to get work done.  Recognition engine,
> language model, sound system interface, etc. etc.. have had many years
> to evolve.  nuance has had a couple of years to screw it up and they've
> done a wonderful job at it.  I think the only positive contribution they
> have made during their stewardship of the product is the addition of a
> Bluetooth microphone audio model.
>
> The only way to get good speech recognition on Linux is for someone to
> drop a small number of millions of dollars into nuance's lap and pray.
> Not a good solution.
>
> I've been thinking about an alternative model for a couple of years in
> between other projects but I do believe the best solution (best defined
> as getting handicapped people working), would be to make use of Windows
> and Linux via virtual machines.  Since virtual machines do horrible
> things to sound systems, I would recommend using Windows as a host OS
> with speech recognition, a mediator to transfer
> characters/commands/keystrokes to the Linux environment and a mediator
> to return window state information such as screen content, application
> running etc. etc.)
>
> There has been a primitive instance (which this has been taken off the
> net) to show the technique is fundamentally sound.  a full function
> mediator, while difficult, is a couple orders of magnitude or more
> easier to build than moving a large and complicated windows application
> to Linux.
>
> in the short-term, run Linux on a virtual machine,  display apps via X11
> server, and use something like natpython and one of its macro packages
> to build commands for Linux applications.  nattext still bite you in the
> ass  with all the random characters and inserts in applications but,
> that's nuances contribution.
>
> ---eric
>
> --
> Speech-recognition in use.  It makes mistakes, I correct some.
>
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