29th
Whatever Happened to Speech Recognition?
In 1982, we could watch Knight Rider on TV, where KITT had both excellent speech recognition (including formidable semantic parsing) and speech synthesis.
In 1986, our second home computer, an Amstrad 6128, had a very good speech synthesiser. It was an external device that plugged onto the back of the computer, and it worked a treat.
So, twenty six years after KITT, where is my speech recognition? Apple OS X has a very basic speakable commands interface built in, but it’s fairly poor, in practice, at recognising what I say. OS X also has rudimentary text-to-speech, but that’s nothing to write (or call) home about, either.
I can’t dictate numbers to my mobile phone. It can’t read SMS out loud to me. Both of those would be useful basic functions.
I would settle for functional text-to-speech and speech-to-text on my computers; I don’t need them to parse complex semantic commands. Why is there no apparent development of speech for personal computers (and other devices)?
