hello Sandra.
NPR Labs in the US has been working on somewhat of a similar project
to what you're talking about, and I've even sene prototypes of some of
the devices that they want to use. NPR labs even captioned one of the
US presidential debates last October to demonstrate the abilities of
this technology. It was done over the web, but was something I could
follow with braille without too much difficulty. A slower braille
reader would certainly struggle to even remotely keep up, but for me,
it was great. Essentially, the issue is funding, as I understand it.
They were using some voice recognition software to get the bulk of the
speech automatically dictated, and then had transcribers check the
text for any errors and to also insert who was speaking into the text.
This would be one issue with automatically translating speech to text
in this sort of environment as I see it. While it's certainly possible
to understand who is speaking based on context, it's not always so
clear. This is why a human needs to still do some of the work.
As for an iOS app, I don't think iDevices currently have the
processing power needed to keep up with a half hour or more worth of
dictation. It would certainly be nice if everyone had access to all of
the info on the radio, but I think the technology is a few years off
yet. Maybe if we ever get technology that would be able to understand
one's voice print, we could then have this part of the process
automated as well. Again, I think this is a bit off yet, though. I've
heard of this radio 4 program, it seems like something I should check
out. Thank you for bringing it to my attention!

Scott

On 6/11/13, Sandratomkins <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
>     I was just listening to a programme on radio 4 UK, called "In touch".
> This is a weekly prog dedicated to the interests of the VIP community. This
> time it was looking at the potential of using voice recognition to provide
> Deaf Blind people with a transcript of radio programmes. I should mention,
> for those who don't know it, Radio 4 is primarily a speech based service as
> apposed to music based. There is a scheme afoot, in the States, using
> centralised computing power to begin this service for some radio stations
> there. Now, this got me thinking, couldn't Siri/Dragon do this for us
> directly on our phones? Has anyone come across an app that already does
> this, or am i in the vanguard here?
>
>     Personally, I don't, at this moment, need such a service, but I think,
> this might be useful to some of our members, especially, if, instead of
> waiting for national efforts, we could do it for ourselves. I do see so many
> apps appearing, seemingly, after the horse has bolted, as it were, offering
> functionality to us, the which we already have through the mainstream, but
> an app of this sort might actually offer a new form of access to a
> subsection of VIP iPhone users and increase their access to the spoken word
> in a meaningful way. Also, I am thinking, seeing as many of these apps
> actually learn as they are used, it might provide the basis of voice to text
> recognition on the fly.
>
>     Am I making sense? Does this thought seem useful or am I behind the
> times?
>
>     JMT, Sandy.
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
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