Computer – tea, Earl Grey, hot

David Dorn tried Windows XP’s built-in Speech recognition, and very nearly burst his sides laughing

I happened to be poking around my system the other night, in search of a utility to convert my C: drive from FAT32 to NTFS (because NTFS is faster) and in the process discovered that I’d inadvertently installed the Speech Recognition Module. I say inadvertently, because I’ve rarely had good experiences with Speech Recognition.

That’s possibly down to me, mind, given that I have a fairly broad Geordie-type accent and, like most North-easterners, tend to talk too quickly. “Never mind”, thought I, and decided to give this new source of Star Trek command capability its fair go to get it right.

The headset microphone was already plugged in and sorted – a good one, as well, back electret condenser, stage quality, loadsa money – so all I needed to do was enable the Speech module and train the system.

That looked to be going well after five minutes of training, during which I read the supplied screeds in my usual monotone. It recognised the words properly, highlighting them as I went. By the time I’d finished, it rather looked as if I was going to have a working system I could use on a daily basis.

Word

So, I fired up Word XP, which also supports Dictation, as well as a command-only interface. Well, it does if you’re using a US English keyboard layout. If you’re using the UK English layout, dictation is not supported. So I quickly added the US layout to my profile and switched to it. After all, if you’re dictating, you don’t need a keyboard, so it doesn’t matter if the @ sign and the “ are mixed up.

Now that I’d trained the system, it should have been a piece of cake. So I spoke as I’d spoken during the training (making sure I wasn’t too fast, that I enunciated correctly and so on) sounding like a slightly eccentric news reader on the BBC.

Oh, dear. What a mess! The system must have been deaf – it gave me all sorts of strange words and phrases to match what it thought I was saying. Nothing looked all that close to what I’d said, although I could see where it was coming from.

Brainwave

Then I had a brainwave. It only works with a US keyboard layout, Microsoft is an American company – it wants me to talk to it in a American accent!

So, my wife wandered into my office, wondering who on earth I was talking to as this strange mid-Atlantic drawl escaped from my lips. I didn’t find it too difficult – a diet of Enterprise, STTNG, Deep Space Nine and Voyager as well as Star Gate SG1 has ingrained the intonations and inflections into my brain. That and the fact that I knew the real secret of success is to get the “r” right and talk a bit through your nose – not to say whine, you understand – and off we went.

Success! The flaming thing understood me, y’all. As ah sat theyuh, makin’ darn shee-you’re ah wuz drawlin’ away like an Murcan, it jest heard mah wurdzz and wrote theyum down.

Unbelievable! Funnily enough, in all the years I’ve attended launch events for Speech Recognition systems, I’ve seen them demonstrated by all sorts of people – but never by a Geordie. Americans? Yes. French, even (who, in the IT world, tend to speak English with American inflections), but never a Geordie.

I think I’ve discovered why – they just can’t make a system that can cope with our rich accents!

Oh, well, beam me up Scotty. No, belay that order – beam me up Seven of Nine!

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David Dorn