| Subject | : | IBM Releases Speech Technology To Open Source; Chance to Port to OS/2-eCS? |
| Author | : | BigWarpGuy |
| Date | : | 15 Sep, 2004 on 14:36 |
| "IBM on Monday said it has handed over speech technology to two open-source groups to boost development of speech-recognition applications, which proponents say will eventually become commonplace within customer-service call centers, automobiles and elsewhere. ..." Someone could port to OS/2-eCS? BigWarpGuy - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - OS/2 Warp-ed/eComStation-ed to the very end. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
| Subject | : | Re:IBM Releases Speech Technology To Open Source; Chance to Port to OS/2-eCS? |
| Author | : | warpcafe warpcafe@yahoo.de |
| Date | : | 16 Sep, 2004 on 10:21 |
| Just to clear up on one or two things: People might say "why porting? We have VoiceType for OS/2 integrated." Greetings |
| Subject | : | Re:IBM Releases Speech Technology To Open Source; Chance to Port to OS/2-eCS? |
| Author | : | Kim |
| Date | : | 16 Sep, 2004 on 10:53 |
| Tom, I've used the speech tech within os2 many years ago, but mainly just to launch apps and utilities. But, I've also used the ViaVoice and it's an excellent software to use for alround to write short docs and launching apps, etc. As well used it to build voice macros, ie short voice command could launch multiply actions, etc. |
| Subject | : | Re:IBM Releases Speech Technology To Open Source; Chance to Port to OS/2-eCS? |
| Author | : | Fahrvenugen |
| Date | : | 21 Sep, 2004 on 22:37 |
| I can't speak for others, but I have used VoiceType on occasion. True, it takes a bit to get used to, but can be quite useful I've found. As for ViaVoice, while I welcome IBM open sourcing it, I also question whether it would be worthwhile to port to OS/2. I'd certainly encourage any programmers who wanted to take on the task, but on the other hand I would wonder if those programming skills could be better spent on some of the worthwhile projects which are reported to have a lack of developers. Part of my reasoning comes from recalling a number of years ago when ViaVoice initially came out - hitting the Windows world and IBM promoted it heavily to an end-user market (well, heavily promoted for IBM standards). Despite getting good reviews it never really seemed to catch on to become a "must have" app. Other competing products came out around the same time with similar promotion (Dragonsoftware's Naturally Speaking, and I think there was a third but can't recall what it was called). The promotion even reached a point where applications such as Corel Word Perfect Office had a version which shipped with Speech Recognition (Corel's was essentially bundled with Naturally Speaking). Today I see little emphasis or promotion of any product in the speech recognition market. I hate to compare the OS/2 and Linux market with windows, but in this case I'd have to wonder - whether we like it or hate it, over 90% of PC users are on windows. If this market has relegated speech recognition to what appears to be essentially now a "niche" market, how much of a demand is there for an update to the speech engine in OS/2, where the user base is significantly less? Of course, I'm just stating my opinion here, I don't have sales statistics to back up my statements - if someone has this info then I'd be happy to hear otherwise. I'm just commenting on my interpretation of what I've observed over the past 7 or 8 years. -Fahr12 |
| Subject | : | Re:IBM Releases Speech Technology To Open Source; Chance to Port to OS/2-eCS? |
| Author | : | warpcafe warpcafe@yahoo.de |
| Date | : | 22 Sep, 2004 on 09:43 |
| Yes, you have perfectly described the situation. I also doubt that it would make big sense to "waste" manpower in that niche, but on the other hand, speech technology will be the market of the future. Not on the PC maybe but in automotive it seems. The problem is that speech technology was not the "hot" topic for users in the last years. Instead, it was broadband, USB, file sharing, DVD and wireless. This also applies for users of OS/2 and eCS. Greetings |
| Subject | : | Re:IBM Releases Speech Technology To Open Source; Chance to Port to OS/2-eCS? |
| Author | : | Kim |
| Date | : | 22 Sep, 2004 on 11:19 |
| Using ViaVoice takes as already mentioned a while to get the system to acknowledge and accept once voice. When using ViaVoice Gold, within work, I spent around 2 weeks to get it to accept my voice "errors" and got it to that point that I could navigate Windows 2000 without any problem and as well write letters without bigger issues. Main problem was usually that you needed a system with some nice cpu and ram capacity, even if the VV specs was set rather low. Latest product that I noticed has gain lots of users would be Philips voice software, but that has mainly been due to the fact of larger support for non-english users. Back in 1999 and 2000 IBM had plands to offer a broaden support; but as far I can see nothing much has happened. Guess that would be why IBM is now "giving" up some of the code to hopefully get some boost. |
| Subject | : | Re:IBM Releases Speech Technology To Open Source; Chance to Port to OS/2-eCS? |
| Author | : | RobertM |
| Date | : | 23 Sep, 2004 on 06:29 |
| VoiceType has a continuous speech subsystem with swappable context related dictionaries - and also trains easier than ViaVoice - the differences in the back end perhaps the reason. Also, on faster machines the pause for discrete speech is miniscule - barely more than that of normal speech once VioceType is properly set up. One issue with proper setup is definitely microphone (and it's sensitivity to background and computer generated noises), gain settings, sound card noise sensitivity and the amount of noise the hardware generates. I've had better success using VoiceType on some old IBM PC Series machines than on numerous clones - though those IBMs came in nickel plated cases and were ridiculously grounded with very (electrically) quiet power supplies. The ICSS (Subsystem) should work with ViaVoice's back end as the calls should be the same - it would just mean (if VoiceType Continuous Speech engine couldnt already handle it) that the speech engine could use larger dictionaries for continuous speech. The limitation was probably based on the small amount of memory the MWave Voice Cards used to come with (4MB I think) and bus speeds (transferring a 20,000 word recog. dict. to the MWave even if it had more than 4MB RAM via a 386 or 486 bus on an ISA connector would probably have taken a bit). I think that (no longer necessary) holdover when the engine was ported to OS/2 code to run on an Intel just remained or was never adressed. Additionally, the MWave did an excellent job at voice recognition in 486's (while only running at 25MHz), but Intel chips needed a lot of extra "horsepowere" to achieve the same results (over base OS requirements). Thats obviously largely because the MWave is a DSP - and thus designed for such things as far as was explained to me. IBM even released toolkits to allow any app (including dictation) to use the ICSS - and I'm not aware of any reason why they wouldnt work with the VoiceType Engine that came with Warp 4 as opposed to only with the MWave based VoiceType for OS/2. I dont recall the dictionary size limits, though there is the ability to switch dictionaries on the fly or subsets thereof if memory serves - as well as allowing audio out - which was a feature barely used in the GUI integration with Warp 4 (only used for VioceType error reponses instead of allowing the GUI to also use the MM Subsytem as usual). I never did a full comparison of the APIs, but if they arent the same, they are very similar - and the beauty of Warp/eCS is the rest of the interaction is the GUI integration - ie: SOM and the WPS - which I think the current work on that might suffice. IBM, btw, offered numerous continuous speech products that were OS/2 or OS/2 Warp based (mostly medical and legal fields for dictation). No idea how they worked and most or all were MWave based hardware running the engine interacting with OS/2 or based off of other DSPs (for phone systems, etc). As well as speech recognition, there were speech response systems like ScreenReader/2 and offerings from Elan - all decent sounding to very realistic - all discontinued and buried - the technology is all already there and quite capable and quite old and quite lost. - Rob |
| Subject | : | Re:IBM Releases Speech Technology To Open Source; Chance to Port to OS/2-eCS? |
| Author | : | Kim |
| Date | : | 23 Sep, 2004 on 07:05 |
| Two other interesting products within the IBM Speech series are (asume that it's still available) Via Voice Outloud that it's a speech software that reads out the text and this was used together with IBM HomePageReader (HPR) that "read" the content within homepages and used Outloud to read the content for blind users. The version I got only works with IE and I'm not sure if IBM has done any futher work on it since this section of IBM never gets out to speak about this kind of products. |