Re: [Accessibility] Call to Arms

[Christian Hofstader]

On 07/27/2010 12:57 PM, Richard Stallman wrote:
>      


> rms: Need a first step for this whole process should be collecting a corpus for
>      training and experimenting with different recognition parameters.
>
> rms: This is something our community should be able to help with.
> It needs someone to take the lead.
>
> rms: ISTR reading about a project of that general nature.  I hope Chris
> remembers the details.  I think it needed some practical support work.
> Would you or someone else like to help?
>
>    
cdh: I have an ever growing file of items related to voice recognition. 
I think one of the coolest ideas came from rms who suggested that we 
send people a corpus and have them record themselves reading it. We then 
use these recordings to train speech recognition engines and see how the 
results work out. This is slightly cumbersome for blind people without 
braille displays as they will need the synthesizer to tell them what to 
say in chunks small enough to be memorable but not cause pauses that are 
too long in their recordings. Of course, this task is easy and we can 
ask our friends from all walks of life to read a page or two short  
story  and send us their wave file. Pretty much everyone can do this so 
asking our friends and relatives outside the hacking world will have as 
much value as anyone else.

cdh: SOmeone, name somewhere in my notes, volunteered to run the 
training software using these recordings to see what we can find.

cdh: I think we need to learn some details on how widely the range of 
accents we can accept varies. For instance, do most people need to speak 
with a relatively "standard" US accent or do our friends up in  Harlem 
and down in Mississippi need to be excluded?

cdh: Can we make variant engines based on whether the speaker has a 
blackcent, a serious southern accent, a latino accent, etc.?

cdh: Since the call for arms, speech recognition has, by far, been the 
hottest topic regarding our project priorities. If I had to bet, I'd 
have thought it would have been Firefox and OpenOffice with orca.

cdh: I'll be in this motel until Friday when we start our drive north to 
our Cambridge residence and I'll be online a lot. Can someone volunteer 
to help collaborate with me on writing a two or three page project 
proposal that will help list the tasks related to speech recognition, 
skills of volunteers, existing components and help me find a person to 
lead the accessibility speech-recognition project? We will, of course, 
put this document out for comment on this list to refine it but, as I 
said in my original call to arms mail, it's time to get hacking.

HH,
cdh



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--
Happy Hacking,
cdh

Christian Hofstader
Director of Access Technology
FSF/Project GNU
http://www.gnu.org, http://www.fsf.org
GNU's Not Unix!