Re: [Access-activists] Re: [Accessibility] Call to Arms

[Christian Hofstader]

> rms: However, you say that the free software speech recognition programs
> are so far behind that you consider them unusable.  If that is the
> case, then we simply cannot recommend ANY program that works with
> NaturallySpeaking.
>
>    

cdh: Has anyone actually done an objective study of the FLOSS speech 
reco engines with an eye on comparing them to DNS, IBM ViaVoice/ETI 
Eloquence, the dictation built into MS Windows Vista and 7? We all seem 
to be working under an assumption that DNS is superior to all others but 
have we tried a real world comparison? ALso, after we get going on our 
corpus collection project and train the FLOSS engines, we should do 
another compare and contrast between the currently existing engines. If 
the process shows us that the libre engines, after the retraining 
process, work reasonably well, we will have an acceptable alternative to 
DNS. Of course, if we don't know how well the different engines work 
relative t each other today, we have no baseline from which we can start 
to measure improvement/decay anywhere.

cdh: Can someone volunteer to read some standard bit of modern English, 
perhaps a chapter from Harry Potter or some other relatively simple 
vocabularly set, into a bunch of different FLOSS and proprietary engines 
and publish the results for each of us to check out?

cdh: From there, we  can do our massive corpus collection, repeat the 
tests and know pretty well where we need to start. I think this would 
be  a really useful exercise.

cdh: Also, I've never tested this but I've heard that DNS does poorly 
with command and control tasks as it prefers streams of speech  rather 
than one or two words at a time. If this is true, it may be a really 
poor solution for the programming by voice solution as, in this 
modality, lots of single terms will be more necessary than continuous 
speech.

cdh: What do you people think?

cdh
> Because our goal is to replace nonfree software, NOT to enhance it.
>
>
>
>    

--
Happy Hacking,
cdh

Christian Hofstader
Director of Access Technology
FSF/Project GNU
http://www.gnu.org, http://www.fsf.org
GNU's Not Unix!