Re: Voice recognition software?
* A. F. Cano (afc@shibaya.lonestar.org) wrote:
> So, let's start this subject rolling,
> What's the status of speech recognition for Linux these days?
I'm afraid things are still pretty much in the might-be-great-someday
phase. Last time i checked free software for speech recognition was
pretty much inexistent. The sphinx guys have advanced, apparently their
latest sphinx version is much, much better than old stuff, but still no
dice, and as with such research software some assembly is required (a
little bit more that just "some" in fact).
Since there's a debian package for sphinx2 (which i've never been able
to use as anything other than an unreliable toy), i think that making a
sphinx3.5 package wouldn't be too farfetched, but then again i'm not the
mantainer. I'd personally settle for a just-apt-get-it-and-works kinda
package that would sit there waiting for the mic and return any words
spoken to stdout, just to be able to do some commandline tricks with it
or to let it sit on some server to give it commands or to make a debian
version of Serial Experiments Lain's Navi computers or just to brag :)
The xvoice team was working on replacing their dependence on viavoice by
replacing it with sphinx, but i think the project's pretty much stagnant
now.
IMHO full-blown speech recognition in the free software world isn't too
close, since it depends on lots of research that's behind closed doors.
If IBM suddenly decided to GPL their viavoice stuff and release free
data files (the language models i think it is), we'd have full-blown
free voice recognition everywhere within a year later after that, and
about 2-3 years later it'd start to really mature as free software, but
then again i'm just guessing here. Since they've given lots of support
to linux it's probably not too farfetched, but we don't know the
internal politics behind it all.
---------------------------------------
"Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to
find easier ways to do something."
Robert Heinlein
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