Fast-Tracking Speech Recognition
Open Wide
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Open Speech Initiative seeks to bring advanced speech processing to free software.
Over the years, free software has seen at least a dozen projects to implement speech recognition. However, even the most advanced of these projects, such as CMU Sphinx[1] and Festival [2], often lag behind commercial equivalents, largely because of a lack of resources. To close this gap, Peter Grasch, a KDE developer from Austria, launched the Open Speech Initiative [3] in October 2013 with the goal of assembling "a team of developers looking to bring first class speech processing to the world of free software."
This is an ambitious project, but Grasch argues strongly for its importance.
"Speech recognition," he says, "is a greatly underutilized input method. Over the recent years we can at last see it slowly being adopted in mobile applications, and I think this trend will surely continue. I am not saying it can or will replace the other input methods we have now, but there are many use cases where speech input can simplify things. At least, after the first Iron Man movie came out, I think many would agree," Grasch adds, referring to the extensive speech processing capabilities that the movie's protagonist has embedded throughout his home and office as well as in his combat suit.
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