Well, well... finally somebody is developing something useful in the field of speech recognition for non-English speakers, which should be interesting for most of us here...
Let me start by saying that a month or so ago I tried to incorporate the speech recognition functionality into my installation of EventGhost. First i tried the SpeechRecognition plugin that ships with EG, then I read about the aformentioned application mentioned in another thread by stottle. I googled and read upon the subject of speech recognition, downloaded dozens of applications (some very fishy software - probably malware), i even tried some development packages (libraries), but whatever I tried, I was disappointed with the performance (very unreliable recognition).
Who hasn't tried it before, probably doesn't know the fact that speech recognition has been in development for decades now, but unfortunately most of the effort has been on the English language, at least commercially. The problem of the SR is so great that enormous resources have to be invested, and the biggest market is of course the English language. So if you want to control your computer with some other langugae, you are most likely out of luck. Currently, there are only TWO commercial, kinda serious, easily available speech recognizing engines: one is Microsoft's SAPI 5.x and the other is Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Microsoft's API is English-only (i think). Dragon has a few major languages but only a few. So unless you speak one of those, you're out of luck. Dragon, although it supports more languages than Microsoft, is hard to interface with outside applications (although it can be done if you're a developer or power-user). Another problem with Dragon is that it is meant for continuous speech recognition - dictation for short. In our situation, discrete speech recognition (command and control) is more preferable.
As I said, I've tried many solutions for speech C&C over few weeks and not even one was useful. And it must have been more than 10 of those. I was excited to stumble upon this "simon" software, after reading about the approach the developer took I thought "finally, something that makes sense". The vocabulary and sound model can/must be built from scratch, and your personal voice is used in building that. So it doesn't really matter what language you speak, because you can enter the phonemes for each word individually. In a command&control scenario, where the vocabulary is quite small and the recognition must be close to 100% to be useful, this is A GOOD THING.
So, is this "simon" then a great software or what? Unfortunately, after reading all about it, installing it (quite a complex procedure) and training a few words, putting in the grammar and doing all that's necessary, the thing DOESN'T WORK (at least for me). I'm not talking about the plugin for EG, but about basic simon software. When i tried to "activate" the connection from client to the server, all it says is:
Couldn't start recognition because the system reports that the recognition is not ready.
Please check if you have defined a wordlist, an appropriate grammar and recorded a few trainings samples.
The system will then, upon synchronization, generate the model which will be used for the recognition.
I've triple-checked about everything the suggestion says, and everything is okay. I've also googled about this error and it said something about a requirement for the shadow dictionary - I downloaded and imported one, although none exists for my language (Slovenian), I just used English one. This shouldn't impact anything, as I understand shadow dictionary is not actively used. I'm at a loss of what else could be done. PeterLo, if you're the author and can help me out, I'd be very greateful. I would just LOVE to have this thing up and running. Btw, I'm using Windows XP if that matters.