Sierra Semiconductor Corp, San Jose has unveiled Aria Listener, two new chip sets that add speech recognition capability to its recently introduced Aria audio set: when used in add-on sound boards using the Aria Listener chip sets, the new parts enable users to interact with their personal computers through spoken commands by buying boards that are expected to sell for under $300, likely in November; Aria Listener comprises two chip sets, the ST8003 and ST8004, claimed to be capable of recognising active vocabularies from 60 to 125 words at any one time, although an unlimited number of words can be stored on disk and swapped from disk to the sound board, as needed; the ST8003 also includes the Aria Synthesizer, a 512Kb sound library, a joystick port, digital audio recording and playback, and a MIDI compatible with the Roland MPU-401 port; the ST8004 expands the sound library to 1Mb; the chips handle both speaker-dependent and independent vocabularies, the former enabling the user to create a personalised vocabulary, the latter enabling single vocabularies to be mass distributed to third party developers; if the Aria Listener is consistently exposed to a speech impediment like English English, or accent, it will adapt to the end user’s speech characteristic when it has been put right a few times, while maintaining its speaker-independent features; the parts are $65 and $84 respectively for 10,000-up.
