Windows Vista speech recognition = shit

[Gary Whitta]

LOL

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/archives/2006/07/31/fun_with_vistas_speech_recognition.html

[barstein]

That made my whole day worth it!

[Hans Lauring]

I saw a truly amazing voice recognition program at CES. People would walk up, ask they guy questions and everything he said would appear on screen. Of course it might have been tuned to his exact voice... and it did cost close to $2000, so there's an explanation it works better than yet another thing Microsoft copied and bundled with an OS:

[Michael Fortson]

I saw a truly amazing voice recognition program at CES. People would walk up, ask they guy questions and everything he said would appear on screen. Of course it might have been tuned to his exact voice... and it did cost close to $2000, so there's an explanation it works better than yet another thing Microsoft copied and bundled with an OS:
What was the product?

[Jasper Phillips]

Heh. I feel sympathetic pain for the poor bastard running the demo. :-)

You'd think they'd have tested it in a noisy room before trying to demo it live...

[Raife]

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

SkyNet has become self-aware.

[Jake Plane]

Also interested in that voice recognition software Hanzii. While $2,000 is a significant amount of money, if it works it's worth every penny.

Raife - very funny

[Chris Nahr]

Larry Osterman (http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2006/07/31/684327.aspx) admits that it was all his fault.


If you've worked with analog audio, it's pretty clear what's happening here - there's a timing issue that is causing a positive feedback loop that resulted from a signal being fed back into an amplifier.

It turns out that one of the common causes of feedback loops in software is a concurrency issue with notifications - a notification is received with new data, which updates a value, updating the value causes a new notification to be generated, which updates a value, updating the value causes a new notification, and so-on...

The code actually handled most of the feedback cases involving notifications, but there were two lower level bugs that complicated things. The first bug was that there was an incorrect calculation that occurred when handling one of the values in the notification, and the second was that there was a concurrency issue - a member variable that should have been protected wasn't (I'm simplifying what actually happened, but this suffices).

As a consequence of these two very subtle low level bugs, the speech recognition engine wasn't able to correctly control the gain on the microphone, when it did, it hit the notification feedback loop, which caused the microphone to clip, which meant that the samples being received by the speech recognition engine weren't accurate.

[JMR]

So in other words he forgot to reroute the primary power coupling to the starboard plasma flux and initiate a level 2 harmonics field.

[nixon66]

But now that he's gone to the Toshii Station and picked up some power converters, everything is going to be a ok.

[LarryLard]

This clip, is it from a serious news programme? And if so, how does this reporter guy not get fired for saying:

"Ouch! Let's not forget the first part of 'recognition' is 'rec' as in 'train wreck'"

????