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Re: HomeVoice discontinued



On Tue, 27 Feb 2007 20:24:15 GMT, nobody@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Dave Houston) wrote in
message  <45e48ebc.600012546@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

>GRHSTechnologies@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

>>> http://board.homeseer.com/archive/index.php/t-102231.html
>>
>>HomeSeer was founded by Rich Helmke, and the post was written by Rick
>>Tinker
>
>Could that be the same Rick Tinker who, when he worked for Home Automated
>Living, said that Hal2000 was the greatest thing since sliced bread while
>HS, HV and other voice recognition apps were toast and who now says that HS
>is the greatest thing since sliced bread while Hal2000, HV and other voice
>recognition apps are toast? I wonder what changed aside from which company
>now provides his butter?

One thing that has changed is that HomeVoice *is* toast.  See message
subject.

Another thing that has changed is I can pick up my TREO, command it by voice
to call AMEX pay-by-phone, and pay my bill entirely with voice commands. Real
transaction. Real dollars. Real simple. Really works. But not much to
trash-talk, so prolly not of interest to some folks.

I dunno what engine that particular banking system uses, but MS continues to
try to make inroads into that market. HomeSeer uses MS SAPI5 and so can use
any SAPI5 compliant engine.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/aug06/08-08MSSpeechTechPR.mspx

FWIW, the SAPI 5.3 Windows Speech Recognition (WSR) engine included with
Vista is  version 8 and supports specialty dictionaries (aka "dictation
topics". MS XP Tablet used version 6.1; The original XP  didn't ship with
any. Some manufacturers shipped their own SAPI5-compliant engines (eg, my
Toshiba Tablet).

Here's the infamous MS Voice Wreckage-nition demo for those of you that
missed it last August:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1123221217782777472

"Dear aunt,  let's set so double the killer delete select all ".

The failure was reportedly due to an intermittent bug in the audio
gain-setting software

http://blogs.msdn.com/robch/archive/2006/07/29/682479.aspx

demonstrating once again the sensitivity of Voice Commands/Recognition to
audio signal quality.

Other than that,  ;-) MS WSR seems to be catching up to Dragon Naturally
Speaking (which I haven't evaluated/used since ~v7 )

... Marc
Marc_F_Hult
www.ECOntrol.org


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