- This topic has 3 replies, 1 voice, and was last updated 11 years, 4 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
I saw a commercial for Dragon, a voice command software that takes what you say and turns it into typed words or commands for your computer.
Does anyone know if it does more than English? If it can handle Gaeilge as well? And has anyone here ever used it?
I haven’t looked on the website for the software yet, but I will do that presently. 🙂
Go raibh maith agaibh!
The people behind abair are trying to raise funding to do the necessary work for this.
Speech to text is harder than text to speech (and needs training also)
I don’t believe there is any solution for Irish speech to text yet.
Some ten years ago a friend of mine had the Philips Free Speech Viva software for PC… I remember it started training in English but then it could be made to do Finnish and Swedish at least… anyway, these are all languages without (significant) initial mutations. With Celtic languages, the program would need to be made to distinguish mutated words from their unmutated homophones and other tricky stuff which may even prove difficult to untrained people. For example, in the case of Irish, it would have to know where to put FH, or whether a H sound is spelled TH or SH… and so on.
The software ended up being an expensive toy to play with, as it never worked for my friend in the original purpose. Even though it learned to relay everything into text verbatim, and he could dictate page after page directly into text, someone always had to retype almost everything, which was a tedious job, and approximately tripled the time consumed before a final text was ready. Due to the same ailment that prevented him from typing directly or editing his text, his speech was incoherent and the resulting text needed a lot of work to become presentable to the public. So, I ended up typing from his dictation and parsing on the run.
The people behind abair are trying to raise funding to do the necessary work for this.
Speech to text is harder than text to speech (and needs training also)
I don’t believe there is any solution for Irish speech to text yet.
That’s great that they are working on this, and I wish them all the best of luck on it.
For example, in the case of Irish, it would have to know where to put FH, or whether a H sound is spelled TH or SH… and so on.
Yes, this is a good example of something I have run into when trying to do writing from just hearing words spoken. Often there is a question of spelling, and it’s true the software would probably have the same problem if it were not programmed to recognize words in context with others and also grammar. That would be a difficult piece of work to program and also probably very expensive if it was released to the public. However, I don’t think it is impossible, and though it may be some considerable time before anything close to accurate is released, I think it will come in time and be well worth the trouble.
Go raibh maith agaibh, a Aonghuis agus a F.F.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
