Xref: utzoo comp.windows.misc:975 comp.sys.next:1217 comp.sys.mac:24964 comp.cog-eng:859 comp.sys.ibm.pc:23071 sci.lang:3885
Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!mtuxo!mtgzz!drutx!clive
From: clive@drutx.ATT.COM (Clive Steward)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.misc,comp.sys.next,comp.sys.mac,comp.cog-eng,comp.sys.ibm.pc,sci.lang
Subject: Re: Why are there no Speech Recognition products for the Mac??
Message-ID: <9901@drutx.ATT.COM>
Date: 10 Jan 89 10:11:46 GMT
References: <2972@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu>
Organization: resident visitor
Lines: 30

From article <2972@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu>, by pam@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (.):

Gee, that was a really nice list of the PC voice recognition products.

The thing is, I think what people are saying is that this kind of
product, while useful, is a far distance indeed from machine recognition
of even careful casual connected speech.

I played with a '1000 word' system like these about 15 years ago, which 
someone in the Technical Center had bought at Tektronix, for playing with.
Cost $10,000 then, was much larger than a PC card.  I taught it some Korean,
which it (for sound phonemic reasons) phound (it's a fitting brainwave typo,
I don't know where these things come from but they're sometimes fun) easier 
to distinguish than American.  I'd just wanted to know if its sound pattern 
matching algorithms were ethnocentric.

What's nice is that the price and size have gone down.  And yes, it
would surely be fun to have such a card for a Mac bus. 

Maybe with the new Mac bus?  But do people buy Mac II[x]+ for being
driven by simple voice commands?  Though it could be wonderful for say
a person whose body fails them in certain ways.  Tell the windows to
move around, things to open, talk letters at least into appearing,
with all the formatting and see what you'll get advantages of Mac.

Maybe we need a Mac bus to PC bus converter just for running such
cards.  Shouldn't be so expensive, or hard, as long as super
performance wasn't goal.

Clive Steward