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. -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list Ubuntu-accessibility@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
