[dundee] having a conversation with your OS

[Colin Brough]

> My sons dyslexic, so we tried most voice recognition software over the 
> years, but having to train the software by reading passages from the 
> screen, just didnt work.
> It had to be able to recognise the user's voice and vocal patterns, 
> hence the user had to read the passages - not a lot of use for a dyslexic.
> For voice control of the OS though I found IBM's viavoice better than 
> Dragon naturally speaking (sorry both were windows based software).
> Glaswegians had great problems with training the software, my friend and 
> his wife, both managed to fill the whole screen with red - unrecognised 
> - words.

For a while ViaVoice was available on Linux - not open source. As I
recall a couple of commercial versions of Mandrake had it. I have an
old ViaVoice SDK on my machine, but I never managed to get it to work
and have no idea whether it is now so old it couldn't be made to
work. 280Mb worth, in 12 large tar files, which seem to expand to a
series of i386 RPM files.

Not much use, but just FYI!

Cheers

Colin

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Colin Brough                             Colin.Brough at blueyonder.co.uk