I'm also following this thread. I had to program by voice for three years in the '90s, first with Dragon Dictate, and then with Naturally Speaking. I eventually wrote 1,600 voice macros mostly to control emacs to help me do my job.
When I started with Dragon Dictate, I was excited about the rapid progress for the disabled. Dragon Systems was doing wonderful things for us. Then, Dragon Systems shipped a tool for voice-dictation aimed at regular users. Progress stopped, almost dead right then, and never picked up again. I want to add voice recognition solutions to Vinux, which is built on Ubuntu Lucid. However, Naturally Speaking remains the best voice recognition engine, and there's little reason to believe the recent owners, Nuance, will port it. Nuance also bought Eloquence, the best TTS engine for the blind, IMO, since it can be well understood at very high speeds. Eloquence use to run on Linux, but there is no evidence that Nuance will release any new version for our platform. Modern open-source research and advancement is somewhat promising. Espeak seems to get better each year, though it's far behind Eloquence for high speed. Then there's svox pico around the corner from Google, which may help bring open-source natural voices along. On the recognition side, there's some advancement, but I have yet to see any good FOSS demo on Linux. One dumb thought I had this morning: Could we just call the original developers and ask for their help as consultants on FOSS ASR and TTS? They must be long gone from their companies, and I imagine that their non-competes have expired. What really counts is the know-how. If they could consult on algorithm specification and development, without giving up any trade-secrets, they wouldn't have to write one line of code. I'd be we'd find FOSS devs willing to code it up. Bill On Sun, May 16, 2010 at 9:51 AM, Pia <[email protected]> wrote: > I just wanted to ask that you guys not take this topic off list. It was > one of the most seriously useful conversations that has been on here for a > long time, because it looks at the future of a barely functional state of > things which is really what we all should be concerned about. So, I have > been reading the thread closely. I just have not added much yet, because > I would just be repeating much of what has already be said at this point. > > Kind Regards, > > Pia > > > -- > Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility > -- Ubuntu-accessibility mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-accessibility
