RE: PC Speech Recognition

["Keith Doxey" <ukha@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I've been wanting to go this way, too ... investigations so far
show
> very limited progress.   IBM ViaVoice doesn't seem to be the answer,
> despite teh big company push.   The problem seems to be multi-fold -
the
> multitude of people's accentts & manners of speaking, room
acoustics &
> noise, and the still very limited understanding of how language &
words
> work !   We intend to use it for the house - it comes as one of the
many
> options of the Idratek system ... but in a limited way.

By far the biggest hurdle to overcome, as Phil mentioned, is to get a clean
feed of the voice to be recognised. Noise gates help significantly by
shutting off any sound from mics that are just picking up low level
background noise.

The problems really start as soon as you put the radio or TV on because the
sound from that will be picked up and will "open the gate" so
that "noise"
will be heard in addition to the wanted voice. If the unwanted noise was a
Mono audio source then it could be cancelled out quite significantly by
taking a feed from the source,inverting the phase and then adding a slight
delay so that the clean audio feed and the picked up audio feed were 180
degrees out of phase and could be cancelled. That would give quite a good
"wanted voice" signal even though there was noise in the room.

Unfortunately, very few of us listen in Mono so you would have multiple
sources of noise arriving at different times, each of which would require
individual cancellation.

The only "easy" way to get a clean feed of voice is with a
headset featuring
a noise cancelling microphone. A Bluetooth headset as mentioned by Phil may
well work OK but you then have to walk round looking like a plonker!!!!

Having solved the problem of getting a decent feed of audio you then have
to
work on correctly recognising it. Best to carry a brick in your pocket so
that when the system suffers from "ILS" (Ian Lowe Syndrome) and
refuses to
turn the light off you can throw the brick at the bulb!!!!

Keith