I’ve seen Microsoft employees claim that, properly trained, Windows’ speech recognition was 99% accurate. Over time, a voice dictation program learns your accent, whether you pronounce the “a” in apricot like “bad” or “ape,” and how to filter out our unconscious verbal tics. That, of course, was just the baseline. As anyone who’s used dictation software can tell you, the key to accuracy is training. The speech community seems split on whether relatively minor mistakes like this are significant. Windows also had an odd habit of interjecting the word “comma” when I was dictating the punctuation mark. In my tests, based on a methodology I developed for another speech recognition product I’m testing, Windows produced an accuracy rate of 93.6%, That’s pretty bad on paper, and somewhat behind the dedicated software I’m trying. If you used voice dictation software to write it, a 95.0% accuracy rate would mean you’d have to correct more than fifty mistakes. This story has 1,028 words in it, including subheadings. When I tested Windows’ speech capabilities, however, I experienced firsthand the merciless perfection that’s required for the system to be usable. Voice dictation for the masses is here, right? The quality of integrated array mics within PCs like the Surface Book mean that dedicated headsets aren’t necessarily required to achieve superior accuracy. What has changed, however, is the hardware: Listening for and interpreting speech requires far less processing power than a decade ago. Some of us still think about voice dictation in the same way Doonesbury lampooned the Apple Newton, turning “I am writing a test sentence” into “Siam fighting atomic sentry.” And you’d be forgiven for thinking so, too: Windows Speech Recognition is powered by the Microsoft Speech Recognizer 8.0, which has remained literally unchanged since Vista. Word displays a similar response for “speech recognition.” Why speech recognition can’t be too perfect We decided to give it another chance: We delved into Windows’ voice dictation features to see how they compared to more recent speech-based technologies.Īsk Word 2016 about dictation, and it’s like the app has never even heard the term. “There is really no reason why it is not playing a much more prominent role yet.” “This is such a great question,” said Harry Shum, the executive vice president overseeing Microsoft’s speech-recognition research, as well as Cortana and Bing, when asked last year about dictation’s future within Microsoft Office.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |