Harness the Power of Voice Recognition Technology on Your PC

Excerpted from How Stuff Works
1) To convert speech to on-screen text or a computer command, a computer has to go through several complex steps. What you speak, you create vibrations in the air which the analog-to-digital converter translates into digital data that the computer can understand. To do this, it samples, or digitizes, the sound by taking precise measurements of the wave at frequent intervals. The system filters the digitized sound to remove unwanted noise, and sometimes to separate it into different bands of frequency It also normalizes the sound, or adjusts it to a constant volume level. People don't always speak at the same speed, so the sound must be adjusted to match the speed of the template sound samples already stored in the system's memory.



2) Next the signal is divided into small segments as short as a few hundredths of a second, or even thousandths in the case of plosive consonant sounds -- consonant stops produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract -- like "p" or "t." The program then matches these segments to known phonemes in the appropriate language. A phoneme is the smallest element of a language -- a representation of the sounds we make and put together to form meaningful expressions. There are roughly 40 phonemes in the English language (different linguists have different opinions on the exact number), while other languages have more or fewer phonemes.

3) The next step may seem simple, but it is the most difficult to accomplish and is the is focus of most speech recognition research. The program examines phonemes in the context of the other phonemes around them. It runs the contextual phoneme plot through a complex statistical model and compares them to a large library of known words, phrases and sentences. The program then determines what the user was probably saying and either outputs it as text or issues a computer command. End of the process.

Voice recognition software has been around for a long time, but it's only in the last few years that it has become accurate enough and simple enough to use with any regularity. It has also been rather expensive, with "basic" versions running around $80-100 and "premium" versions running to several hundred dollars - prompting many buyers to ask what was missing from the lower-priced versions.

If you have Windows Vista, though, you might be surprised to find that voice recognition is built in - and that it's pretty good. While it takes some getting used to, with a little practice you'll soon be able to use speech recognition to create and edit documents as well as to control most of the functions of your computer.

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