Thread: Poll - do you want voice dialing on the N900
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Wikiwide is offline Wikiwide
2010-11-02 , 12:03
Posts: 2,000 | Thanked: 3,345 times | Joined on Jun 2010 @ N900: Battery low. N950: torx 4 re-used once and fine; SIM port torn apart
#152
Originally Posted by WereCatf View Post
It's one thing to match pre-recorded samples to microphone input, and an entirely different matter to do complete speech-to-text recognition. Try for example Google's own recognition system: even with all the processing power their servers possess the recognition system can't achieve more than about 70% accuracy and that is when the speaker speaks very, very clear. If the speaker doesn't speak all that clearly, if there is any kind of background noise, if the person speaks some dialect, or if (s)he has some sort of an accent to the speech the correctness of recognition drops sharply.

Then there's the issue of N900 being a small device with limited microphone capabilities: there is not enough processing power to do accurate recognition, and the microphone would receive sufficiently clear input only when spoken very near to it.
Google has to recognize any voice of any human. Personal speech-to-text recognition could be trained on pre-recorded samples of one human.

It shouldn't be more difficult to recognize speech than to recognize text, at least in some simpler languages (with strict relations between characters and sounds).

A better microphone could be connected through the jack, couldn't it?
I have at least two plug-in microphones, though I rarely use a microphone at all, on any device.

The most serious issue would be battery life. But for in-car hands-free experience you can plug N900 to the car charger.

Imagine: N900 in pocket, wired microphone clipped to the collar, some wired headset on the ear (not blocking outside sounds!), small solar panel on the bag; walking/bicycling in an unknown city. No need to look at the touchscreen to receive a call on the go or to read/send emails or to find out directions to your destination. Though for such a futuristic use case you would have to be in a city with free Wi-Fi, well mapped and sunny.