At AIX Expo a couple of weeks ago, IBM Corp held a demonstration of its speech recognition technology project. Unlike many current speech systems, the IBM system recognises thousands of words. The demonstrator had first trained the system by reading it about 100 sentences. During this time, the system created a voice profile of the speaker. The program was then able to recognise just about any word that he spoke, although it was necessary to leave a slight pause between words. In a test that involved reading from an article in the AIX Age newletter (published by Nims Associates of Dallas, Texas), the machine was able to recognise 23 out of 25 words. The demonstrator then called up a window which showed which words had been considered for each utterance. Of the two words that were missed, the correct words were numbers two and six respectively on the list of possible choices. The intention of this capability is that after identifying the wrong word, the operator displays the window of choices and indicates to the machine which was correct. The system uses this information to improve its model of that speaker’s particular voice. At this time, IBM has no firm plans for offering the speech recognition system as a commercial product – it has been working on the thing for several years now.
