[mythtv] Speech enabled MythTV

[hpoley at dds.nl]

Citeren Mark Edwards <mark at edwards.homelinux.net>:

> Cory,
> 
> I've often thought about this myself... Festival looks pretty good and not
> to hard to integrate. The real killer would be to add speech recognition
> too.
> 
> I've often thought of saying "Play Sibelius" to the computer and have it
> answer me with a possible selection... the Speech Synthesis is fairly
> mature for linux, but the speech recognition might just be a little
> harder. I was looking at sphinx...

As far as I can tell his goal is not (primarily..) to have speech recognition, 
but merely speech output. Visually handicapped people can use a remote control, 
as long as you can feel the seperate keys. btw, he is trying this because even 
if they can't 'view' TV they can hear it, and when you are at home with your 
(non-handicaped) friends it is much nicer if you can control the TV by yourself. 

Just think about it. Suppose you are blind, and you would like to watch/listen 
some sports game with with your friends. That's easy, switch on TV, find remote, 
find chair, find numpad on remote, tap in the channel number, listen if the 
channel is correct -aka, the TV has seen all the keypresses-, press the numbers 
again if not. Easy, just a number.
(btw, try this some time with some blinder for your eyes, you will see that 
things like finding the TV set, remote, buttons and your chair will be difficult 
to find without training)

Now change the scene, you would like to record this game, so you can view it 
with your friends this evening. Now you have all sorts of menu's to go through, 
with MythTV and even with normal VCRs. You will need to remember where you are 
in the menu, what is to come. And worst of all, you don't have feedback if the 
VCR actually seen the keypresses on the remote. Some kind of voice or audio- or 
tactile-guidance would be nice. Else it is virtually impossible, you would need 
to ask someone to help you.

Another thing. You have watched the game and at the end of the game someone asks 
to switch to CNN Teletext/CeeFax to see if there is an update on the news of 
today. Okay, maybe you can do this yourself, but uhm, it's just text. Having it 
spoken in a sensible way would _really_ nice. (btw, are there good voice 
browsers for linux?)

AFAIK, there are already (should be) VCR systems that do have voice response. 
But most of the time these are made untop of some 'ugly' text based system, 
having a nice and sleek PVR menu like MythTV would be sweet.

Speech recognition would be a cool feature off coarse, but not really needed 
here. And you would almost always need a Windows or Mac machine to do the 
recognition, virtually all commercial Linux speech recognition programs have 
been canceled. And the open-source versions are not really up to the task 
(AFAIK). They are mostly programmed as a demontration model for students, much 
like Minix is a demonstration model for an Operating System, you can use it 
'seriously' but you will need to add a lot of stuff on the way.

    Henk Poley <><