Re: IBM just announced speech recognition: was (Re: gnome and handicapped access..)

[Jochem Huhmann <joh unidui uni-duisburg de>]

On Tue, 27 Apr 1999 00:54:35 EDT bratsche@dfw.net wrote:
> 
> <smirk>
> 
> Sorry, Elliot. I didn't mean any harm. But speech recognition of that
> caliber would require a great deal of study before it could be attempted I
> would suspect. My intent wasn't to discourage anyone from beginning to
> develop a speech recognition tool, but rather to suggest that we don't
> hold our breath and instead adopt IBM's until such time as there is a
> promising package with a friendlier license.

Would it be possible to wrap IBM's voice recognition in such a way that
it could be replaced with other "engines" later?

I'm not sure how all this is related to gnome, though. I really don't
care about voice recognition in a GUI. A nice daemon that sits in the
background and supplies a voice-interface (with an integrated scripting
language like guile, python, tcl, perl or even bash) to my system would
be much more powerful. Actually Unix is a perfect platform for such
things, a GUI is more of a problem than a solution in this regard. Just
imagine a kind of (limited) "natural language shell"... Such a thing
could transform a "weakness" of Unix (old-fashioned text orientation and
a large pool of scriptable tools) into a unique strength.

However, there is already some KDE-related voice recognition, has 
anyone tried this?

  subject: KVoiceControl 0.16
 added by: Frederic L.W.Meunier (fredlwm) on Mar 10th 1999, 21:52
  license: GPL
 category: KDE/Applications

 homepage: http://www.kiecza.de/daniel/kde/index.html
 download: http://www.kiecza.de/daniel/kde/kvoicecontrol-0.16.tar.gz
changelog: http://www.kiecza.de/daniel/kde/NEWS

description:
KVoiceControl is a speech recognition system that allows the user to
connect spoken commands to unix commands. It automagically detects
signals coming from a microphone then performs recognition on this
speech input and in case of successful recognition executes the unix
command the user hooked up to it.





-- 
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Jochem Huhmann  *  Duisburg, Germany  *  joh@uni-duisburg.de
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"Microsoft NT is not computer science. It is computer scientology."