Voice Recoginition
It's here today

Ever since watching Star Trek as a little child in seeing the guy talk to his typewriter and have his typewriter print out every word he says, I've been fascinated by speech recognition and its practical applications. �The scene was memorable for me because in it a girl got very frustrated because the typewriter kept on typing out everything that she said even as she screamed "stop it, stop it", heedless of her instructions.

I'm dictating this post to my machine in its entirety with Dragin NaturallySpeaking 8.0. �You might notice my spellings improved just a bit because now a computer is doing the spelling. �I'm speaking in a perfectly natural tone of voice and with a quite normal rhythm, not in stutter speak with a pause between each word. �It even knows all the correct capitalizations, although I do have to tell it the commas and periods.

I'm not used to speaking out my documents and I find it not nearly as flowing as typing but for somebody who is unable to type this would be an absolute godsend. �I can do everything I can do with a mouse using this, except for maybe play a game. �Perhaps checkers or chess. �I do however find it fascinating that I don't have to speak in anything but a perfectly normal flowing conversational voice and it absolutely picks up every single word. �If you are talking on the phone to me you would not know I'm doing anything different. �This can absolutely be used to transcribe conversations on-the-fly once it's been trained for the user. �Training isn't even that hard; it recognizes you after a few sentences and improves with use. �Now, if it would just talk back to you...

I've now typed this entire post without touching the keyboard once. �I love technology.

- Kevlar

(Edited by Kevlar at 8:46 pm on Aug. 2, 2005)

I had a similar program back in the day on my Mac when I first got it, although the program didn't quite run with ease.  It was, however, completely different than typing.  I used it for long term papers, yet I'd have to continually go back and correct many errors.  Of course that was 2-3 years ago.  

Haha, I love voice recog, I wrote a program in Visual Basic awhile ago that used Microsofts Voice reg software.. it was excellently star trek.   The way it worked, it would match the word I said, and run it through a parser I had setup, to seek a match.  If it found a match (eg, 'Computer') it would then move on to the next word, (eg, 'Explorer').  And search for a match among the functions that were listed under computer.

So I could say, "Computer Explorer" and it would open windows explorer.

Or I could say, "Computer Dictate", and it would start plastering the words I spoke into whatever window was open at that moment... until I said the stop dictating phrase.

Very handy, but at the time I wrote it, the software was still a bit buggy, and it wasn't all that useful.  I should check it out now.

I'd rather have a girl from down under to call my own. ;)

Love that accent. *wonders where the TeamSpeak server got off to...*

teamspeak. bah.