Speech recognition- oh the wonder

jtsuited

Unbelievable, just started using this for the buzz!! Hours of fun. What an age we live in. Anyone else use it, or do y'all feel a bit mental talking to a computer?

gerry87

not too stupid talking to it, very stupid shouting the same phrase over and over when it doesn't understand. I still can't get mine to tell me the punchline of it's knock knock jokes.

Anyone know if you can do speech to text?

Asiaprod

gerry87 wrote:

Anyone know if you can do speech to text?

Yes it can. A friend of mine used it to write his thesis and I was amazed at the accuracy that it developed over time. I will check the name of the software for you.

jtsuited

imagine how legend that would be for songwriting. Please find that software's name, what an age we live in!!

SouperComputer

helps if your try to talk in an Americal Accent though.

Its been part of Mac OS since OS9 (1999)!

gerry87

Is it possible to make new speakable files?

Gordon

SouperComputer wrote:

helps if your try to talk in an Americal Accent though.

Its been part of Mac OS since OS9 (1999)!

Mac has speech recognition?!

Never knew that, where is it?

Asiaprod

Gordon wrote:

Mac has speech recognition?!

Never knew that, where is it?

I think this refers to the speakable commands in the preference panel, but that is very limited.

Asiaprod

jtsuited wrote:

imagine how legend that would be for songwriting. Please find that software's name, what an age we live in!!

Contact my friend's friend (he is out of the country right now) and the software is called IBM ViaVoice. It came out under OS9 so not sure if it has been upgraded for OSX.

Gordon

Asiaprod wrote:

I think this refers to the speakable commands in the preference panel, but that is very limited.

Ah right.

Theres a nice automator script iirc that enables you to write a block of text and it converts it into audio using the speech synthesiser.

ambro25

Dunno how I ended up in this thread :rolleyes: I was checking on my only-ever thread in Mac asking if anyone wants a vintage SE 1/40 for free

IBM's ViaVoice was one of the pioneering products for voice-to-text, and good for them to try and start the whole thing, but...

Naturally Speaking is currently the benchmark for such applications. I don't know if they make a Mac version, however - but if they do, I can vouch for the software itself, which I use daily (and have been for a couple of years) in a professional capacity. As a Wintel product, you can go with the latest (v.9, standard €40/€50 RRP or so) or try your luck finding the earlier version in budget bins (v.8, €10 or so). Would a Mac "Wintel emulator" run the Wintel version? Note that it's quite hungry, CPU and RAM-wise (PIII 800 or more and at least 384 RAM for v.8 to work 'fluidly').

I use the English v.9 and the French v.8, and I can't tell any performance difference between them (that must mean I've definitely lost my natural FR accent then ). Both work in real time or differred (record a wav/mp3 and let it transcribe to *.txt or *.doc in the background or as a scheduled task).

Most recent speech recognition apps use a rather heady mix of AI algos and waveform analysis to adapt their recognition patterns over time. My 'fault' rate used to be something like 10-15% at the beginning - two years on and it's struggling to reach 2% or so. And that's with very technical vocabulary :eek:

The joy of barely ever typing your posts or emails