[Gllug] My Mrs. gets involved.

[Nix]

On Thu, 22 Nov 2001, tet at accucard.com muttered drunkenly:
> That is, of course, rubbish. Like any other speech recognition
> program worth its salt, Via Voice will learn the characteristics
> of your voice and adapt accordingly. Thus it'll quite happily
> recognise your voice, even if you're a Geordie with Chinese and
> Argentinian parents, brought up in Uzbekistan doing an impersonation
> of Adolf Hitler. As far as the program's concerned, it's just
> associating a pattern of noise with a word in its dictionary.

No speech recognition program worth its salt requires you to train it on
its entire corpus. The entire point of these programs is that they can
determine what sounds on the input are likely to map to specific words
*without massive training* (of course *some* is needed).

These mappings are critically dependent on what for lack of a better
term I'll call your accent. It's a very hard problem making speech
recognition of people with a wide range of accents work right; I'm
merely saying that Dragon currently (well as of two years ago when we
got Dragon) seems to be better at it than ViaVoice.

> The only claim you could make is the Dragon NS recognises a wider
> variety of accents in its default out-of-the-box state than does
> Via Voice.

This is, uh, the point.

-- 
`Many people have tried whispering in his ear, and indeed bellowing
 with megaphones but up to now he's seemed to be completely
 clue-immune.' --- John Winters

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