testing simon

I just found out that it is possible to drag and drop words from the shadow dictionary to the right column:

Simon allows you to drag and drop words for training

That’s a pretty nice feature. By the way, the shadow dictionary has about 8000 entries. It had been generated by importing the German PLS dictionary a few hours ago.

Thougts about XML:

In my opinion, the open source speech recognition development community needs to shift more to XML-based standards. PLS is one important standard for speech recognition. For the training of utterances (prompts), an SSML interface should be developed.

So, Simon allows the import of an PLS dictionary. My wish is that a future version of Simon would be able to import English and German XML documents that are similar to the SSML standard. Let me explain: I try to follow the PLS standard and the SSML standard. But when I discover problems, I prefer to rely just on XML.
To be more concrete: PLS documents should have the ending ‘.pls’ (I think that I have read that somewhere in the internet). But I prefer to use the suffix ‘.xml’. The suffix ‘.pls’ could be interpreted as ‘playlist’. This ambiguity should be avoided. So the suffix ‘.xml’ seems to be better.
And what about SSML? I don’t know whether SSML allows the use of FLAC audio files. But I prefer FLAC over WAV. So I am using just FLAC.

XML provides solutions to a lot of problems of artificial intelligence. Speech recognition is just a special case of artifical intelligence. Think of the world as a big giant graph – XML helps us to describe this graph. XML documents can be read by humans and can be processed by specialised software (e.g. Simon can import PLS documents).

My goal is to get an open source dictation system. I think that we can reach this goal by shifting to PLS (already done) and to SSML (has to be done).

At present, neither VoxFore nor Simon use the advantages of SSML. But for the training of our speech models, SSML would increase the usability for the end user.

Simon currently allows to get XML texts from the internet:

Download training text from the internet

This extension is just for text. But there should be an extension for XML documents that provide access to FLAC files. Such an extension for the import of SSML/XML documents from the internet would be very useful.