Speech Recognition - Ready for Prime Time?
by Jarred Walton on April 21, 2006 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
Health Considerations
There's at least one more area that can be a direct benefit to many people -- I know it has certainly helped me. Typing on the keyboard for many hours every day is not the healthiest of practices. Every keyboard on the market today carries a warning about repetitive stress injuries (RSI), and with good reason. Not everyone will have problems, and not everyone that has problems will experience the same degree of discomfort. However, the more you type and the older you get, the greater your chance for developing RSI from computer use. Needless to say, I am one of the many people in the world who has developed carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS).
There are many things you can do to try and combat carpal tunnel problems. Some people feel that ergonomic keyboards will help, and at least for me I found it to be more comfortable than a regular keyboard. Getting a better chair and desk will also help -- you want a chair and desk that will put your wrists and hands in the proper position in order to minimize strain; if you're not comfortable sitting at your computer, you should probably invest in a new chair at the very least.
Even with modifications to your work area, though, there's a reasonable chance that you'll still have difficulty. You might consider surgery, but while that will generally help 70% of people initially, many find that discomfort returns within a couple years. The simple fact of the matter is that the best way to avoid RSI complications is to eliminate the repetitive activity that's causing the problem in the first place. That means that if typing on a keyboard is giving you CTS, the best way to alleviate the problem is to not type on a keyboard anymore. That makes it rather difficult to write for a living, as you can imagine.
Of course, it usually isn't necessary to completely stop an activity that's causing RSI. The phrase itself gives you an idea of how to avoid difficulties: avoid excessive repetition. Typing 20 pages of text per day on a computer would probably cause anyone to get CTS eventually. Typing 10 pages per day would probably cause problems for many people, but not for everyone. Typing five pages per day would likely only affect a smaller portion of the population. Finally, if you could cut it down to one or two pages per day, most people would be fine. That brings us to the present topic: speech recognition. Used properly, speech recognition has the potential to eliminate a large portion of your typing, among other things.
Languages are complex enough that learning a new language is always difficult. We spend years growing up in an environment, learning the language, learning the rules, developing our own accent, etc. No two people in the world are going to sound exactly alike, and it goes without saying that everyone makes periodic mistakes in grammar and pronunciation while speaking. Programming a computer so that it understands everything that we say, corrects the mistakes, and gets all the grammar correct as well is a daunting task at best. Nevertheless, speech recognition has so many potential benefits that it is considered one of the Holy Grail landmarks that we want to achieve, and research on the problem has been in progress for decades.
As time has passed, computers have gotten faster and the algorithms have improved, and we're at the point now where real-time speech recognition is actually feasible. Mistakes will still be made, and dealing with different accents and/or speech impediments only serves to make things more difficult, but for many people it is now possible to get accuracy higher than 90%. That isn't that great, as it means one or two mistakes per sentence, but it's a good place to start. I've got a couple pieces of software that purport to achieve higher than 90% accuracy rates after training, so that will allow us to perform some real world benchmarks.
There's at least one more area that can be a direct benefit to many people -- I know it has certainly helped me. Typing on the keyboard for many hours every day is not the healthiest of practices. Every keyboard on the market today carries a warning about repetitive stress injuries (RSI), and with good reason. Not everyone will have problems, and not everyone that has problems will experience the same degree of discomfort. However, the more you type and the older you get, the greater your chance for developing RSI from computer use. Needless to say, I am one of the many people in the world who has developed carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS).
There are many things you can do to try and combat carpal tunnel problems. Some people feel that ergonomic keyboards will help, and at least for me I found it to be more comfortable than a regular keyboard. Getting a better chair and desk will also help -- you want a chair and desk that will put your wrists and hands in the proper position in order to minimize strain; if you're not comfortable sitting at your computer, you should probably invest in a new chair at the very least.
Even with modifications to your work area, though, there's a reasonable chance that you'll still have difficulty. You might consider surgery, but while that will generally help 70% of people initially, many find that discomfort returns within a couple years. The simple fact of the matter is that the best way to avoid RSI complications is to eliminate the repetitive activity that's causing the problem in the first place. That means that if typing on a keyboard is giving you CTS, the best way to alleviate the problem is to not type on a keyboard anymore. That makes it rather difficult to write for a living, as you can imagine.
Of course, it usually isn't necessary to completely stop an activity that's causing RSI. The phrase itself gives you an idea of how to avoid difficulties: avoid excessive repetition. Typing 20 pages of text per day on a computer would probably cause anyone to get CTS eventually. Typing 10 pages per day would probably cause problems for many people, but not for everyone. Typing five pages per day would likely only affect a smaller portion of the population. Finally, if you could cut it down to one or two pages per day, most people would be fine. That brings us to the present topic: speech recognition. Used properly, speech recognition has the potential to eliminate a large portion of your typing, among other things.
Languages are complex enough that learning a new language is always difficult. We spend years growing up in an environment, learning the language, learning the rules, developing our own accent, etc. No two people in the world are going to sound exactly alike, and it goes without saying that everyone makes periodic mistakes in grammar and pronunciation while speaking. Programming a computer so that it understands everything that we say, corrects the mistakes, and gets all the grammar correct as well is a daunting task at best. Nevertheless, speech recognition has so many potential benefits that it is considered one of the Holy Grail landmarks that we want to achieve, and research on the problem has been in progress for decades.
As time has passed, computers have gotten faster and the algorithms have improved, and we're at the point now where real-time speech recognition is actually feasible. Mistakes will still be made, and dealing with different accents and/or speech impediments only serves to make things more difficult, but for many people it is now possible to get accuracy higher than 90%. That isn't that great, as it means one or two mistakes per sentence, but it's a good place to start. I've got a couple pieces of software that purport to achieve higher than 90% accuracy rates after training, so that will allow us to perform some real world benchmarks.
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JarredWalton - Friday, April 21, 2006 - link
That's definitely true -- if you look at how accuracy scales with CPU usage, doubling and even tripling the processor time comes with only incremental increases in accuracy. I do have to say that I noticed it being a little sluggish on my single core system when I was multitasking, but obviously I push my computers a little harder than a lot of people. Depending on what you're willing to live with in terms of speed, I'm sure both Dragon and Microsoft speech recognition can work on a Pentium III level system.LanceM - Friday, April 21, 2006 - link
So is that selection typical Asimov? If so, it has convinced me to never bother reading any of his works.His ideas/plots/etc. may be interesting, but I don't think I could handle phrases like, "as if she were some dried-up, old-maid teacher." Give me Joseph Conrad or William Faulkner.
Dfere - Monday, April 24, 2006 - link
Asimov is classic Sci-Fi- pulp, which usually had a gritty detective-novel appeal. Hs works are in large part murder mystery type novels. You have to understand the nature of the literature, the history and the author. I don't think a critique is deserved until then.Most Sci Fi writers of any ability first master imaginative concepts and apply them, even Drke and Sirling.
I give Kudos to the staff for including literary comments, the poster who said this should not be a book of the month club lives a very one dimensional life.
Shoal07 - Friday, April 21, 2006 - link
What makes Asimov special is many of his ideas in sci fiction are comming true today or are atleast on the horizon. Asimov shaped the way many of us picture the future.goinginstyle - Friday, April 21, 2006 - link
Why does the Anandtech staff revert to literary quotes in their reviews now? This is a computer website, not a book club.JarredWalton - Friday, April 21, 2006 - link
I read Asimov's foundation series as a teenager, and I loved it. He gave me lots of fanciful dreams about where technology might go in the future, and even though some of the writing styles have changed over the years, I still find a lot of these old sci-fi books to be entertaining. You should try reading War of the Worlds if you think that quote was bad. LOLSorry if some of you didn't like the quote. Everyone has their own dislikes and likes, but in the end it's just an introduction. I hope to one day be able to yell at my computer and have it properly understand what I say, as well as the context (i.e., yelling means something is going wrong, and maybe it can help me out). Will we ever get there? Probably some day, but whether it happens in our lifetimes or not is anyone's guess.
NegativeEntropy - Saturday, April 22, 2006 - link
I like the use of quotes -- though it does remind me a bit of being in English/writing class ("Always do something in the introduction to get your audience's attention...").On the subject of "classic" Sci-fi writers, I also still enjoy old school Heinlein. Though his characters can get a bit repetitive across his pile of works, many of the science ideas are still valid (and I share much of his apparent personal philosophy).
On the actual article -- thanks for doing it. I have been curious where this technology was at in terms of every day usage and hardware requirements.
Regarding CPU usage, it's possible DNS attempts to use whatever resources are available based on preferences. i.e. on minimum, it attempts to impact the system minimally, regardless of the CPU resources available; say 25% on min, 50% on med and 95% on max with the percentage staying relatively consistent from a P3 1GHz to an A64 2.6GHz. This would explain its reported good scaling from system to system. If you want to test it, underclock your A64 system to half its frequency and compare utilization at the medium setting.
kristof007 - Friday, April 21, 2006 - link
Here at Anandtech you can always count on to find something else. Great article! I tried out speech recognition a few years back and I got frustrated with it over one thing or another so I just dropped it and went back to typing. I've been typing for about 8 years now. I never learned the "proper" way to type where every finger has a spot. Anyway I hope Vista will make speech recognition WAAY better so that it could be used around the OS AND for speech recognition.Thanks for the article!