Thursday, November 14, 2002
Talk to the Machine
Posted by Jason Dunn in "THOUGHT" @ 02:44 PM
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/sep02/voic.html
If you've ever wanted to know exactly how voice recognition works, give this article a read - it's a very detailed write-up of the current status of voice recognition, and how the technology works. Very enlightening!
"Max Huang says he has something cool to show me. I'm skeptical: he's holding in his hand what looks like a PDA. It is a PDA, a Compaq 3600, to be exact, unadorned and, to my eyes, unremarkable. What's special is what's inside: this PDA understands what you say.
Huang and his colleagues at the Philips Speech Processing office in Taipei, Taiwan, have streamlined the company's standard speech recognition engine, meant for servers and PCs, to run instead on a PDA. It's just a prototype, Huang says, but the Mandarin-language recognizer can distinguish about 40 000 words and still not tax the Compaq's memory, power, or processing. With it, Huang can access his address book, schedule appointments, and dictate e-mail. Considering the alternative—poking away at the device's tiny display with a skinny stylus—I'm starting to be convinced: this does seem pretty cool."
If you've ever wanted to know exactly how voice recognition works, give this article a read - it's a very detailed write-up of the current status of voice recognition, and how the technology works. Very enlightening!
"Max Huang says he has something cool to show me. I'm skeptical: he's holding in his hand what looks like a PDA. It is a PDA, a Compaq 3600, to be exact, unadorned and, to my eyes, unremarkable. What's special is what's inside: this PDA understands what you say.
Huang and his colleagues at the Philips Speech Processing office in Taipei, Taiwan, have streamlined the company's standard speech recognition engine, meant for servers and PCs, to run instead on a PDA. It's just a prototype, Huang says, but the Mandarin-language recognizer can distinguish about 40 000 words and still not tax the Compaq's memory, power, or processing. With it, Huang can access his address book, schedule appointments, and dictate e-mail. Considering the alternative—poking away at the device's tiny display with a skinny stylus—I'm starting to be convinced: this does seem pretty cool."
