Comments on: Garmin nuvi 800 Has Speech Recognition – Just Like Star Trek http://www.pcmech.com/article/garmin-nuvi-800-has-speech-recognition-just-like-star-trek/ Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On Mon, 23 Nov 2009 01:37:34 -0500 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.5 hourly 1 By: Tom Mariner http://www.pcmech.com/article/garmin-nuvi-800-has-speech-recognition-just-like-star-trek/comment-page-1/#comment-10161 Tom Mariner Wed, 07 May 2008 13:19:47 +0000 http://www.pcmech.com/article/garmin-nuvi-800-has-speech-recognition-just-like-star-trek/#comment-10161 I was the first to put speech recognition and synthesis into a car 20 years ago. (A voice controlled cruise control) I can't imagine that the state of the art has not progressed further than it has. I own and love a Nuvi 660 but recognize that touching a screen while driving is not conducive to avoiding collisions. So when the 800 with recognition was announced, I got exited. Then the reviews came in stating that the unit generally only followed the button pushes and used no intelligence in its use of commands. With a 400 MHz Arm available for processing, it really ought to be able to figure out what I want to do if I say, "I want to go to 125 East End Avenue" instead of saying exact command words and telling it that I don't mean the East End Avenue 2000 miles away. And the part about the speech recognition in a varying car noise profile was solved by us that long ago -- We trained the thing in a convertible stopped with the top up (dead silent) and it still worked reasonably well at 70 with the top down. The main problem we had was that with all that wind noise, a persons voice changes its pitch and inflection to be recognized by other people. Have we really forgotten how to do that? We are receiving faint spread spectrum signals from space on a software radio and deciding where we are on the surface of the earth and we can't put a bit of AI into the thing? And it ain't just Garmin -- At least they tried. I was the first to put speech recognition and synthesis into a car 20 years ago. (A voice controlled cruise control) I can’t imagine that the state of the art has not progressed further than it has. I own and love a Nuvi 660 but recognize that touching a screen while driving is not conducive to avoiding collisions. So when the 800 with recognition was announced, I got exited.

Then the reviews came in stating that the unit generally only followed the button pushes and used no intelligence in its use of commands. With a 400 MHz Arm available for processing, it really ought to be able to figure out what I want to do if I say, “I want to go to 125 East End Avenue” instead of saying exact command words and telling it that I don’t mean the East End Avenue 2000 miles away.

And the part about the speech recognition in a varying car noise profile was solved by us that long ago — We trained the thing in a convertible stopped with the top up (dead silent) and it still worked reasonably well at 70 with the top down. The main problem we had was that with all that wind noise, a persons voice changes its pitch and inflection to be recognized by other people. Have we really forgotten how to do that? We are receiving faint spread spectrum signals from space on a software radio and deciding where we are on the surface of the earth and we can’t put a bit of AI into the thing?

And it ain’t just Garmin — At least they tried.

]]>