Would a voice dialling solution by the community be possible at all? I remember even free text2speech solutions being most frustrating, especially when used with languages other than English. Is there any existing project out there that could handle voice dialling and voice commands at least on the level S60 does? Which means: No training required, no previous recording of the names you want to dial, just talk and the application will recognize if it's a command or a name from your contacts... For all languages Maemo supports, of course, not only English.
Of course they need to improve (I have my own silly transcriptions too lol). But, they have an advantage with voice now. Hopefully they'll bring that to other platforms besides Android..
hmm I wonder if Android sends audio samples to Google..
Yes. I'd love to see that as well. It seems to take a lot of computing power, though. I know there are programs for Windows OS (Dragon Naturally Speaking, Windows Vista speech to text) but they require powerful computers or else it takes too long to execute. The OQO was able to do it with one giga of RAM, just. I believe there are some cloud based utilities that provide this, for a substantial fee, of course, and tied to certain phone providers only. Furthermore, I understand (well my understanding is based on the past few days acquaintance with maemo, so it is very limited) there currently are no voice recognition apps for / in maemo.
Have a look at Wikipedia and you will see that Naturally speaking has been around since the early ninetees. The computers in those days were a couple of order of magnitudes weaker than the N900. If those computers could manage voice processing so can the N900. But also remember that to do voice dialing it is not a question of the much more difficult free speech recognition, but only of mapping a short sound stream to one out of e.g. 200 distinct names in your phone book. But I don't even want the phone to do the speech to text mapping. I would settle for making my own recording for each phone entry. The software would then only need to search for the entry with the best correlation of the phone entries to the search entry, which is a much simpler problem. That's the way voice dialing worked in my old Siemens phone, btw.
The sum of my experience of voice dialling is hearing a robotic "Say a command!" every time I fumbled a pulling a previous device out of my pocket. I can't repeat here the command I habitually offered
Have a look at Wikipedia and you will see that Naturally speaking has been around since the early ninetees. The computers in those days were a couple of order of magnitudes weaker than the N900. If those computers could manage voice processing so can the N900. But also remember that to do voice dialing it is not a question of the much more difficult free speech recognition, but only of mapping a short sound stream to one out of e.g. 200 distinct names in your phone book. But I don't even want the phone to do the speech to text mapping. I would settle for making my own recording for each phone entry. The software would then only need to search for the entry with the best correlation of the phone entries to the search entry, which is a much simpler problem. That's the way voice dialing worked in my old Siemens phone, btw.
OK so you are saying the N900 could handle speech to text from a pure power perspective. I haven't seen that for Linux based computers, though. Does it exist?
When I typed what I did about speech to text, I was answering somedude's comment about speech to text "but i would love to see the speech to text, where i can talk and the phone would encode that in text and send it. would love to have that feature," and not the voice dialing per se. We were off topic.
And yes, I agree it is about mapping a short sound stream, and there are even those command "code word" based applications. The question I have though, will Nokia or a third party provide it?
OK so you are saying the N900 could handle speech to text from a pure power perspective. I haven't seen that for Linux based computers, though. Does it exist?
When I typed what I did about speech to text, I was answering somedude's comment about speech to text "but i would love to see the speech to text, where i can talk and the phone would encode that in text and send it. would love to have that feature," and not the voice dialing per se. We were off topic.
And yes, I agree it is about mapping a short sound stream, and there are even those command "code word" based applications. The question I have though, will Nokia or a third party provide it?
The main voice recognition software for Linux is Sphinx. See:
