Speech recognition software
From time to time, and since I use my keyboard a lot, my right wrist hurts. I can control it, however I tried to find another way of controlling my PC. So, the regular way is through voice and speech recognition.
Since I do not have the funds to acquire a commercial system and I certainly do not want to return to MS Windows just to use speech recognition software, I tried to find any speech recognition software that is available in GNU/Linux. Voice recognition in open-source systems is non-existant, period.
There was only one commercial system widely available, IBM’s ViaVoice - for only 40$. However, I cannot find it now. There was also XVoice which integrated ViaVoice with the X Window System. As I can’t find ViaVoice, it is also dead to me - the site hasn’t updated for many years.
One promising system is Sphinx-4 from Carnegie-Mellon University. It is a complete rewrite of C-based Sphinx-3 in Java. It looks good, it works somewhat OK and has had to be updated for 2+ years. Shame… I have used it and didn’t work flawlessly. However, I believe it is the best choice out there.
We also have the Open-Source Speech Recognition Initiative. It has started, but never released anything. The site is a bit poor, but expect miracles if the guys get proper funding. Nothing more.
The last piece of software is cvoicecontrol. It worked fine with me, although it needs to be taught to recognize your voice. Unfortunately, its author is now an employee in a speech recognition software company, so he stopped the active development. Anyone with speech recognition knowledge to resume development?
Although we’ ll have a full 3D environment in Linux in a few year’s time, we’ ll only detach ourselves from the keyboard in a decade or so. Unless Apple comes out with speech recognition software and integrates it with MacOS X. Because if Apple does not do such a thing, no-one will ever care.