From: Dario.Broggini@f307.n331.z2.fidonet.org (Dario Broggini)
Newsgroups: misc.handicap
Subject: Speech Recognition
Date: 6 Nov 92 15:07:20 GMT
Reply-To: Dario.Broggini@f307.n331.z2.fidonet.org
Organization: FidoNet node 2:331/307
X-Fidonet: Silent Talk Conference
Originator: wtm@sheldev.shel.isc-br.com

Index Number: 25489

[This is from the Silent Talk Conference]

In a message about speech recognition, Doug Roberts wrote:

 Speech Recognition: is anybody out there experimenting
 with this technology on their home computer? I know
 that speech recognition has a long way to go yet, but
 perhaps there are some rudimentary forms that would be
 useful, especially for the hearing impaired, like myself.

 If there were a system that did nothing more than recognize
 individually pronounced characters, it would help me
 on the phone a lot. So that when someone starts spelling
 their name to me, or giving a number, it would show up
 on my pc screen. What is available for just that?

Dear Doug:

What you write is really what I was always thinking! What you call
"individually pronounced characters" are the so-called 'phonemes'.
For instance, when you say the phrase: "I need something to listen
to the phone", you are really saying a sequence of phonemes that
cannot be written in real Int'l Phonetic Ass'n (IPA) symbols here,
but that could be approximated as this: /ai'nid 'sAmTHin tA'lisAn
tADHA'foun/.

The same sentence in Italian is "Ho bisogno di qualcosa per
ascoltare il telefono" and could be approximated as: /obi'zoNYo
dikwal'koza peraskol'tare ilte'lefono/. Now, if such a device
should transcribe the phonemes in IPA, you had to make a very big
effort to recognize the words from those characters.

I have a better solution for transcribing English phonemes, but it
cannot be used in an electronic device because that device cannot
know what the words really are. For instance, I usually write the
dot of an i over the E of "English" and the u of "business", so I
can remember that those vowels have the sound of an i (in IPA it
would be /i/). But no device can understand when it has to write a
dotted E or U instead of an I. So you stay in trouble. Instead, in
Italian and Spanish there's no trouble because such languages are
written phonetically. But another problem remains: every person
pronounces the same phoneme in a slightly different way, so that
the device has to work hard to recognize it as the same sound.
Think of the different way a man and a woman speak. Honestly, I do
not know if there's already a device capable to recognize single
phonemes in a continuous speech.

If that device exists, I also need it! I would use it to read on
screen what the people say. Maybe you know the song "O sole mio"
(Oh my sun)... If it could be transcribed on a computer screen
without any attempt to isolate the single words (a hard work for a
machine!), but emphasizing the stressed vowels (i.e. in capital
letters), like: [ osOlemIo ], then I'd have no difficulty in
understanding what's said. But I fear that the researchers
presently active in this field don't share this way to see the
things, because they all are intent on making the machines
recognize individual words, not phonemes, and this is a mastodontic
effort for machines that have less intelligence than a mosquito! So
I fear the hearing people will continue having dictation devices
not really useful for business, and we deafies having no simple
phoneme transcribers! I hate when the things go such way...

 _ _

In reply to that message, Jack O'Keeffe wrote:

 Speech recognition may be closer than you think, Doug.  I attended
 a conference last year in Cambridge, MA, sponsored by the Regional
 Bell Operating Companies, on speech input/output.  Patricia Flynn
 McKenzie of Dragon Systems told us that Dragon was now demoing a
 continuous sppech recognition system with 10,000 word vocabulary.
 Said they were waiting for faster hardware (which has since become
 available).  She predicted availability in two years, and that was
 almost a year ago :-)

Jack, that's very interesting for me! You have to understand a
thing. Italian has no more than a thousand commonly used syllables
(in opposition to English, where practically any word is a
syllable). Since the short pause between a syllable and the other
has the same duration of the pause between article and noun (for
instance "the wall" = "il muro" are both pronounced as they were
single words), if that Dragon system is already capable to
recognize 1000 words in continuous speech, with indifference to
minimal variations of the sounds, then it can be already adequate
for me. I could set it to recognize as words the single syllables
of Italian, so it could transcribe _all_ the Italian words for me,
syllable after syllable. In the example above, "O sole mio" would
become [ o so le mi o ]. Do you think it can already be done?

_ _

In his reply to Doug, Daniel Pratt wrote:

DragonDictate and VoiceType both provide accurate voice recognition
of up to 40 words per min. I'm a quadraplegic who uses DragonDictate,
and it works unbelievably.

Dear Dan:

But does it work unbelievably because it recognizes your own speech
only? Sure, you speak and it writes, but you can hear what other
people say, I think? If another person speaks at normal speed, can
your device transcribe what s/he says without having to load a
vocabulary previously built upon her/his voice??? If so, I do need
it!!! :-)

If not, all the deaf still have to wait... :-(

Ciao-Bye!
	    \ /
_______            _:_
Gatto Bianco

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