Re: [Accessibility] resident evil

[Chris Hofstader]

I had the VoxForge  contact information somewhere in my pile of notes on speech 
reco and would have found them today. Bill and I talked about them on the phone 
yesterday and I think we can do a lot to help them under the auspices of 
FSF/GNU and lots of other places where my wide network of friends and 
acquaintances hang out. 

Recording a little text a person reads  is one of the easiest things for 
someone to do and I do not believe that we need "clean room" studio like 
conditions or really expensive microphones. Clearly the Nuance way of gathering 
information (see below) probably got a lot of input from really bad 
environments for sound. Unlike Nuance, though, I do not think we can get 
millions of samples but we can probably do pretty well anyway.

The NYT reported this past week that Nuance had improved the recognition 
accuracy of NS by about 15% by using their "Dictate" iPhone app gather tens of 
millions of samples of different people saying different things under all sorts 
of conditions all over the US and Canada. The shrink wrap license for their 
iPhone app effectively said that Nuance could do anything they wanted to do 
with your data. This "anything" included not just what you had their server 
recognize for you (one might consider this a fair trade as you get text in 
exchange for helping them refine their collection of samples) but, instead, 
included virtually all text they can find on your handset - including contacts, 
notes, emails, browser history/favorites, etc. I think it may have been the 
most invasive EULA I've ever read and, given that I've read the iPhone AppStore 
Developer EULA, that's saying a lot.

The Times article was really interesting and I can probably dig it out of my 
trash if anyone cannot find it using google or searching in the way you like 
the most.

HH,
cdh
,  
On Jul 31, 2010, at 9:07 PM, Richard Stallman wrote:

>    http://www.voxforge.org
> 
> Helping voxforge is a useful thing for us to do.
> Can someone make a plan for how we can usefully contribute?
> The FSF has some resources we could use for this.
> For instance, we could inform lots of people that we are
> asking for help.  And maybe other things.
> 
> 
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