Hi Esther,

That's interesting, I've never heard about it before.  I imagine you're right 
that the logistics of creating software that could reliably convert speech to 
text without training, would just be impractical.
Cheers,
Donna
On Jul 17, 2013, at 4:31 PM, Esther <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi Donna and Aman,
> 
> I think it's not that what you're looking for doesn't exist, but that there 
> aren't commercially available solutions.  Back in 2005-2006, shortly after 
> the original MacVisionaries list got started, there was a podcast search 
> engine named PodZinger, later renamed EveryZing.  I think it must have been 
> running a version of the continuous speech recognition system that the 
> company responsible for this effort, BBN, started developing about a decade 
> earlier.   At that time the number of broadcast podcasts was much smaller 
> than now.  The PodZinger search engine let you type in a phrase or set of 
> keywords, and then it would pull up a match to identified podcasts, and even 
> estimate the time the phrase occurred within the podcast.  It was sort of 
> like doing a Google search for podcast audio content, and pretty impressive.  
> You had to type in enough words in the search term to identify the context, 
> because just like a Google search you'd get a short section of matched 
> content, but you didn't have to really type more than you would for a Google 
> search.  I think this service  was only around for a couple of years.
> 
> Probably this was an outgrowth of  Department of Defense funded research. You 
> ca probably do a web search to read more details.  I don't know of anything 
> like that exisiting commercially, and you'd probably need to have a huge 
> training set (like the database of Siri users with different accents and 
> speech patterns) to train the software.
> 
> HTH.  Cheers,
> 
> Esther
> 
> 
> On Wednesday, July 17, 2013 1:51:34 AM UTC-10, Donna wrote:
>> Hi, Aman,
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Unfortunately, it was the latter.  I kind of didn't think that there was 
>> anything that could do this, but I figured if it was out there, someone on 
>> this list would know about it.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> thank you for responding, if nothing else, it's good to be sure that what I 
>> was looking for doesn't exist.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> 
>> Donna
>> 
>> On Jul 16, 2013, at 2:47 PM, Aman Singer  wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> Hi, Donna.
>> 
>>> If I may ask, what sort of speech are you looking to convert? That is,
>> 
>>> are you looking to convert speech from a speaker over which you have
>> 
>>> control, or recorded speech from a person who is willing to read
>> 
>>> training text? Alternatively, are you looking to convert speech that
>> 
>>> is, for example, broadcast, recorded from a speaker who will not train
>> 
>>> the software, or some other speaker over which you don't have any
>> 
>>> control? The first is fairly simple. If you can have the speaker
>> 
>>> record his/her/its training speech on to a digital recorder, there are
>> 
>>> programs which you can train using that recorded speech and they will
>> 
>>> then recognise that particular speaker's recorded voice fairly well.
>> 
>>> If, however, you're after the second, for example, transcribing a
>> 
>>> broadcast recording, I know of nothing that will produce an acceptable
>> 
>>> transcription without human input. If you find such a thing, however,
>> 
>>> I, along with quite a few other people, would be overjoyed, this,
>> 
>>> particularly in real-time, would be a godsend to those of us with bad
>> 
>>> hearing. If you find anything like this, then, please let the list
>> 
>>> know.
>> 
>>> Aman
>> 
>>> 
>> 
>>> 
>> 
>>> On 7/16/13, Donna Goodin  wrote:
>> 
>>>> Hello all,
>> 
>>>> 
>> 
>>>> Does anyone know of any software that will take speech, not dictation but
>> 
>>>> recorded speech, and converted to text? It could either be mobile software
>> 
>>>> or software for the Mac.
>> 
>>>> Thanks,
>> 
>>>> Donna
>> 
>>>> 
>> 
> 
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