He believed there was a universal grammar. Early work on speech - most notably championed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Professor Noam Chomsky - tried to put all human language into a single model. The editing commands made correction easier, as I was able to select words and change them without touching the mouse or keyboard.Įssentially, speech recognition takes phonemes (speech sounds) and tries to make them into words. And it was both fast and accurate most of the time. Nonetheless, I didn't go easy on it, mumbling in my usual manner rather than articulating clearly and without slang, as I would if speaking English to a non-native speaker.
It managed supercalifragilistickexpealadocious pretty well, but got hung on antidisestablishmentarianism.
Siri text to speech program software#
You have to train the software on your particular speech patterns, which takes a few minutes, but then it’s pretty robust. I've recently been trying out Nuance’s Dragon Dictate 4 for Mac, which represents the state of the art in recognition. The industry was excellent at getting above 90%, but the last few percent continues to be a slog. After all, on an average page of 300 words, that’s three errors per page. But people demand extremely high accuracy in speech-to-text conversion, and even 99% isn't enough.
Voice can be used for both control (Okay, Google, open Maps!) and transcription (spoken words converted to text). But voice, one of the most obvious methods, has been strangely elusive.