Hi Rick: "Speech to text technology has improved somewhat over the last decade and even QST had an article a while back with a ham that used this for sending PSK31, rather than having to type the message on the keyboard. "
Yeh, right! Because I incorporated text to speech in DigiTalk for the blind ham to hear PSK31, I was interested in adding speech to text to DigiTalk, so I contacted the author of the article and he admitted, after being pressured, that he always edited the speech text for errors before it went on the air. Text to speech can be quite accurate, but speech to text still has a long way to go. The current error rate is about 5%, which means one word in 20 will be wrong. My own test is to speak the phrase, "My Wife is a doll", and the text usually comes out, "My wife is a Dog"! Nothing I'd ever want to go out over the air! ;-) I wasted a full 40-hour week trying to train Naturally Speaking and IBM Viavoice how to translate my own voice, but everyone who has tried knows that speech to text is OK for letters that can be edited afterwards, but not for use in real time. 73, Skip KH6TY
