[Asterisk-Users] Anybody using Sphinx

[Anthony Wood]

On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 10:22:55AM +0800, Steve Underwood wrote:
> Arnold Ligtvoet wrote:
> 
> >Since I would like the user names to be auto-generated by the system, I
> >would guess that this could best be done using festival with a localized
> >voice. I think there is a Dutch voice for Mbrola with should integrate into
> >festival ( note to self : need bigger harddisk :-) )
> >  
> >
> Speech recognition accuracy is not great under ideal conditions. Doing 
> what you suggest seems unlikely to achieve any meaningful accuracy. 
> Speech recognition training systems require many occurances of a word or 
> phrase, clearly spoken, before their accuracy becomes useful. A one shot 
> utterance from Festival seems to fail on both counts :-)
> 

Sphinx isn't doing general speech recognition, it is determining which
of a list of patterns it has you said, like mobile phones do.

So it's fairly easy to tell between "Jennifer" and "Frank" if there
are no other options.

When you call directory assistance in Australia, the IVR asks you what name
you want, and gives you a suggestion out of the top 100 or 200 names, which you
can accept or reject.  Makes for riducule, but beats waiting on hold.

> Bottom line: the very best speech recognition still sucks. As a British 
> speaker I never get more than about 40% accuracy speaking into a US 
> trained recogniser. I have never had better than about 70-80% accuracy 
> on a British trained recogniser. Strangely, my terrible Cantonese gets 
> nearly 100% on SpeechWorks recogniser. :-\

This is true for general speech recognition, where the computer
has a much larger dictionary to match the sound waves against.

cheers
-- 
Woody