The Impact Of FluidityΒΆ

In general, commands have a special place in speech recognition systems. The system puts extra effort into listening for them, giving them the benefit of recognition in many cases. Imagine a phone system that only wants to hear numbers from you – it will try its hardest to map anything you say to one of the number words it expects. “Sticks hate fun” could easily be accepted as 681. Meanwhile free dictation has a specific bias to hear common phrases and grammatical sentences. If you say “national wonderment”, the system may still recognize “national monument” even if it may have considered wonderment a closer fit. And yes, if the fit was strong enough or the surrounding context weak enough to override the “natural language bias”, then often it will render something less likely, such as “national wonderment”.

When commands are spoken in a row for dragonfluid, only the first part of the utterance will get the magical command seeking boost. Everything chained afterward is subject to being recognized as free dictation. So it is not surprising if you find that commands in the middle of utterances are not recognized even if they never fail to be recognized when at the beginning of utterances, especially if the commands consist of made up words or novel sounds. This means that commands that up to now have always worked for you might present challenges.

You can add novel command words to your vocabulary and attempt to train them to be heard better, or you can alter your commands to things much more easily recognized by your system. In the worst case, a pause between commands stills works, but that’s not very dragonfluid is it.

Case-sensitivity can come into the picture as well. A command of “english” will not be triggered if possible vocabulary values or formatting turns the word into “English”, but start off a sentence with the word “English” and suddenly the magical boost of commands will just ignore the capital letter in it’s attempt to match something from the commands it expects.

In general, if you can dictate your list of commands easily into a plain text document, you should be good to go. If you’re willing to alter your commands then nothing should be able to get in your way! And if you’re really dead set on some crazy alien sounding system you devised and loved, then it’s all up to how trainable your speech recognition system is in the context of free dictation.