World's fastest texter gets pwned by voice recognition
By Chris Ziegler 
posted Oct 27th 2006 12:32AM
posted Oct 27th 2006 12:32AM
A young lad by the name of Ben Cook might be able to school his pals with his lightning-quick text messaging skillz (he even prefers plain ol' multi-tapping to predictive text) but one company set out to prove that the world's fastest texter is still no match for voice recognition. Nuance Communications is gearing up to release its Mobile Speech Platform to carriers -- a system that'll ultimately allow users to dictate SMSes, among other tasks -- and they obviously needed some high-profile way to get the word out, like picking on Ben Cook, for example. For the contest, Nuance pitted its software against Mr. Cook and two Nuance employees packing QWERTY and T9 devices, throwing them each this little tidbit of everyday conversation: "The razor toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygo centrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human." Our world record holder finished in 48 seconds -- not bad, considering he was doing it without any predictive assistance -- but the software spanked everyone with just 16 seconds on the clock. Now we just need to take a hard look at why one would dictate an SMS (versus, say, placing a phone call) and we'll be jumping right on the bandwagon.
SMS is still cheaper than making a call. I'm on pre-paid, so once my balance is on the low-side, I don't make voice calls unless it's an emergency, but SMS is okay since it's quite cheap.
try using that voice recognition system while in a even slightly noisy environment.
just think about the word blue as it applies to brain age.
First of all, the whole point of texting is for when you don't really wanna talk: you're at a loud place, at work, in class, on a date... or you really just don't wanna talk.
Secondly, why don't they have them do a real world text. Something like, "had a great time last night. what are you doing sunday? the boys and I are having a bbq." I doubt that would still blow Ben away.
I think this is more a dictation machine than a voice recognition texter. When they can invent something that can read my mind faster than Mr. Ben Cook can text, I'll be interested.
My Samsung A900 has decent voice recognition for SMS already and I use it sometimes when I'm driving. I know that's bad, but it's safter than typing it, right?
Two Nuance employees also participated, one using a cell phone with a predictive text program that turns partial words into full ones and another with a full QWERTY keyboard on a Blackberry.
Yeah, I bet that voice recognition software correctly predicted "Serrasalmus".
More than likely the dictionary for the voice recognition software had only the words in that test sentence in it.
I've been looking forward to this for months. I communicate with my office via text when on the road. Heavy texting while driving is annoying and I'd much rather be able to send multiple short sentences via voice than texting. Think of it as the convenience of Nextel's walkie feature, without the hassle of Nextel's other service.
you guys are too cynical.. if you don't think you could use voice recognition technology, then DON'T use it, instead of just bringing it down and labelling it as a "stupid" concept.. the important thing is that it's available to those who find it useful.. after all, it is a testament to human ingenuity and brilliance...
oh btw, jason... you're a dumb *ss! "More than likely the dictionary for the voice recognition software had only the words in that test sentence in it." --Posted at 11:49AM on Oct 27th 2006 by Jason
I was at the demo - definately very impressive.
In anycase - most of the audience thought the dictionary was padded with the worlds... It recongnized things too perfectly.
In anycase, it did work pretty well :-)
Quote:
Secondly, why don't they have them do a real world text. Something like, "had a great time last night. what are you doing sunday? the boys and I are having a bbq." I doubt that would still blow Ben away.
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Actually the demo did do "regular" sentence - only problem was that they didn't let Ben use short forms (i.e. brb, imho, etc). He had to type everything out.