A Different Drummer

Following on from my last post, I have been playing around some more with the speech recognition software that is now a part of Windows XP. I had no idea speech recognition technology had come so far in the last few years. Just some background here, I am talking this entire entry using a microphone and I haven’t touched the keyboard except to put in the full stops and commas. I think the speech recognition software still doesn’t know when to insert full stops, commas and other punctuation.

But seriously look on the upside here I’m sitting on the chair speaking into the microphone and every single word that I say is coming up perfectly on the computer. Its making one or two mistakes every paragraph and most of these are ones that are not surprising - for example the difference between “commas” and “comments” but let’s remember that I am speaking in a terrible Australian accent. There's another one right nthere - it doesn’t really understand the way I pronounce “Australia” – but then again not many people understand how ‘strayans pronounce ‘straya

The best thing is its learning really fast. When I started using it about six hours ago it was making a mistake pretty much every sentence. After using it for a few hours it is working much better.

Man, If this speech recognition stuff gets really good it could really change the way we use computers. I'm going to go and buy myself a decent PC microphone tomorrow -the one I'm using right now is a cracked old piece of junk that I found at the bottom of a cabinet in the office. If the speech recognition system gets good enough that it can pick up my voice, talking at a normal pace in my normal accent and write it down pretty much accurately then I could seriously see a lot of potential for using this as an everyday application.

Open the pod bay doors, HAL.