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Subject: Re: Playing Chess Using Voice Only?

Author: John Merlino

Date: 15:55:43 05/18/02

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On May 17, 2002 at 11:39:53, Robert Henry Durrett wrote:

>Today, Windows supports the issuing of commands by voice, using voice
>recognition software produced by IBM.  Many of the operating system commands can
>be issued by voice.  Unfortunately, I am using a Windows 98 machine and the
>software is not really much good on that operating system.
>
>It would be really "neat" if one could play hands-free chess against one's own
>chess computer, or against a chess server on the internet.
>
>Any chance of this capability appearing on the scene anytime soon?

We actually wanted to put this into CM8000 and had settled on one piece of
Speech Recognition software (NOT IBM's ViaVoice, by the way). Unfortunately, the
technology to truly support CHESS just isn't there yet. The problem is that,
although these programs are getting quite good at distinguishing words, they are
not good at individual letters and numbers. Specifically, differentiating:

'a', '8' and 'h'
'b', 'd', 'e', and '3'

is very difficult for standard speech recognition programs. At best, they get
80% or so, and some of the software we tested seemed to produce almost random
results, even when we gave it a very limited dictionary of words/letters/numbers
to choose from.

But, maybe in a few years the improvements will be there. It is DEFINITELY
something we want to do with Chessmaster, but the technology just isn't quite
there yet.

jm



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