Voice input to text

[Korlon]

Hey folks,

I'm working on a collaboration software project, part of which is a text chat client for PPCs. One of our client's requests is to see if it's possible to allow users to speak to their PPCs and convert their speech to text. All I have been able to find so far are speech recorders and specialized speech recognition apps that do things such as look up contacts, write in MS Word, etc. What I would like to have is something that would function as a selectable input method, just like the keyboard and transcriber. Second choice would be a speech recognition/conversion API (for Java, if I'm lucky).

Has anyone seen or worked with a product such as this?

[Sven Johannsen]

No, at this point the ability of the PPC, by itself, to do speech to text is not there. Some time ago at a conference Bill Gates demoed a system that let you talk to a PPC, the raw voice was sent to a Server over WiFi, the server did the processing, and sent the text back to the PPC application. I believe that is doable today with the Microsoft Speech Server technology. If that would meet the requirement, you might check that out.

[Korlon]

Thanks, Sven. I'll look into the Microsoft Speech Server.

For anyone else who might be interested, a co-worker gave me this lead: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/pervasive/embedded_viavoice_enterprise/