RE: PC Speech Recognition

["Paul Gale" <groups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yes I agree with all that.



Have you seen anything other than HomeVoice and Hal2000 for VR control?
Would be interesting to have another look particularly if the app isn't
voice specific i.e. doesn't need training.



Paul.



________________________________

From: ukha_d@xxxxxxx [mailto:ukha_d@xxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Phil
Harris
Sent: 25 June 2006 13:09
To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
Subject: RE: [ukha_d] PC Speech Recognition




> A valid question I thought ;)

... but one where some indication of a bit of previous research or a
narrowing down of the query wouldn't have gone amiss.

The original query is somewhat "open" in its scope and gives no
indication
of "I've looked at x but it seems that it has problems with y whereas
z
doesn't suffer with this but it's too expensive."

> I installed a Shure automatic mixer and decent Crown mics
> around the house a few years ago in the hope that VR might
> work! In my case it was the software that was the problem -
> OK, it worked well in a completely quiet environment but any
> background noise really screwed it up. I personally don't
> think it will be really quite there until the software can
> distinguish between a voice and other noise. Not impossible I
> would have thought - but pretty complex!

Background sounds will always be an issue - hence this is one of several
reasons why I consider voice control to be a party trick or something to
show a bunch of mates after the pub - but voice recognition (as a generic
term) is pretty good and has been for quite some time, it's the provision
of
a suitably clean source for it to chew on that is a problem.

Just p*ss*ng in the wind here as I don't know the details of exactly what
you had in the kit and how you had it set up but if all you had was the
automatic mixer between the mics and the PC then it is possible that your
automatic mixer may have been contributing to your problems rather than
helping to provide a solution. They can sometimes bring up the levels from
rooms where they are just picking up background noise to a level at which
it
can be that that starts to mask "valid" audio.

You can limit the effects of background noise by some pretty aggressive
bandwidth limiting and gating and I've seen a VR system (based around
HomeVoice) that used to work quite well - even with some general background
noise - until the owner got bored with it and just stopped using it.

Phil





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