Poor man's voice web browsing for Windows

Now, if you read my post on voice recognition for your Linux virtual machine, there's no reason why you cannot take the same elements, sans the virtual machine, and have your own custom voice-recognition command center facility in native Windows.

Microsoft's own speech recognition is already there, free, and its "show numbers" feature surpasses anything that Dragon NaturallySpeaking has to offer (as far as I'm aware of; I'm still on version 11). However, for whatever reason, you may one day want to browse the web, or do whatever else, using your own commands. Glovepie can leverage the OS' speech module. Why not avail yourself of free tools? My offered solution might work for you.

Speech recognition settings tests

Always in the quest for better performance, I decided to fiddle around with the various audio settings available for speech recognition and see if any of them yielded better results.

Base system (unless noted otherwise):

Core i5 760 no overclock, 4 gig ram, Gigabyte GA-P55-USB3 motherboard

Win 7

Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.0

Andrea PureAudio USB soundpod external soundcard

VXI microphone

Methodology:

A new user with only the initial training

Same text: National Geographic magazine November 2005 page 1: Who Knew?

Change a variable

Compare number of misrecognitions on each variable change

If uncertain, repeat

Raw data:

# of misrecognitions

Nc= noise cancellation

Nonc= no noice cancellation

30 Micro boost

NC	25
Nonc	30
Nc vxi	21
Nc+ LB	32+

0 boost

Regular	41
A NC	40
Vxi	23
NC Vxi	21

Vxi dif Lmodel	18
+NC	29

Andrea	27
Vxi	14
Vxi Nc	15

Other text

Vxi	28
Vxi nc	26
Vxi dif Lmodel	22
Vxi dif Lmodel NC	23

  

VXI Within a virtual machine

Out	15
VM	15

Vxi dif Lmodel 10db boost

Vxi	24
Vxi Nc	21

vxi

 

Dragon trained	10
Win7 Speech recognition no training	40

Acoustic adaptation

Pre optimized	13
Post	44
Post round#2	14

Conclusions:

• A sound pod is better than integrated sound
• Microphone boost, software noise cancellation and surround settings are best left alone
• The VXI microphone is way better than my old Andrea NC8
• From the get go, Dragon NaturallySpeaking is better than Windows speech recognition
• There is no impact on using it within a virtual machine
• Training the software and correcting misrecognitions works, though I've had mixed results with the acoustic adaptation feature
• Just from personal experience, there are limits to training: some misrecognitions will always remain