“Microsoft has pumped out voice recognition software for years, but the company has a curious aversion to publicizing the fact. With Windows 7, Microsoft’s speech recognition has become a decent productivity tool and one that the company should be proud to proclaim as an OS feature. For the casual speech recognition user, nothing beats free – especially when one considers the $100+ price points for third-party software. But is it powerful enough for serious users?”
My wife is an audio-visually oriented sort of person, and she found out about the speech recognition software in the Vista install of her lappy. She wasn’t very happy with it, though.
She’ll most likely upgrade to 7 when we have the money for it; we haven’t made the comparison yet.
So what’s holding up Mac OS and the various Linux distros from implementing something similar (and I mean a complete, equivalent solution)?
I don’t know the specifics of Windows implementation (never used it myself); but Android – while not vanilla Linux – does have voice recognition. And it’s pretty good (at least for me and my accent).
There have been a couple of projects, though names escape me. I’ve always been under the impression that it is a big technological endeavor, and as sound infrastructures are really standardized in Linux, there are probably quite a few hurdles.
I know I would pay well for speech recognition built into my Linux computers.
Because we know that speech recognition is nothing but a bad joke.
Try using the speech recognition setup via a telephone when calling say a utility companany.
If they can’t get it to work all that well with that kind of limited focus, how well is it going to work on a crappy os like Windows?
You’ll most likely end up formatting your C: drive when telling it call a seaside hotel….
http://www.apple.com/accessibility/macosx/physical.html
That reminds me of… what was it called again? Ah, yes: OS/2.
Warp 4 had voice recognition built-in already back in 1996. That’s quite an achievement I would say, if you imagine what the hardware (and its performance) was like some 14 years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2#The_.22Warp.22_years