Bringing Vista's Speech Recognition Engine to Linux via Wine

[Susan Cragin]

Sam wrote:

So I'm trying to bring over the Vista Speech Engine.

This won't work. It relies on lots of unimplemented stuff. And you'll have to have vista to use it. So what's the point?
Use Dragon it's working on Wine even better then on windoze.

Look at the various versions of Dragon that run under wine. So far the gold standard seems to be either DNS 7.3, which is VERY fast and available cheaply because it is obsolete, and DNS 9.0 preferred, which is slightly slower and lots more accurate.
DNS 10 Standard is a GREAT program and it's what I use, but it has one annoying bug that makes it crash every once in a while. You may wish to wait for that bug to be fixed.
DNS runs very fast and very accurately on Linux for continuous speech recognition into Notepad. It's head and shoulders above anything else. It's even faster on Ubuntu's real-time kernel, but that kernel itself has bugs, so I wouldn't try it right away with Intrepid. (OK if you have Hardy.)
I understand your wanting to use the Vista speech recognition, because you probably got that free with a copy of Windoze, and DNS costs extra money, but it's not the way to go on Linux.
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.p ... n&iId=2077

[Sam]

Thanks for that post, Susan!

I will get hold of Dragon 10.0 and play around...

My main concern is as a developer not a user though.

My objective is a FOSS GUI running on a FOSS SR-engine.

I can see a path to accomplishing this:
1) pull over a closed source engine
2) create the FOSS GUI for Linux that implements (1), and sends speech-data back to a central database (such as VoxForge)
3) Once this database is suitably populated, we can crank up Sphinx, and we will have everything FOSS.

I feel strongly the Linux community needs a raw SAPI-compliant Speech-Recognition Engine, so it can build a FOSS GUI. This is the reason I was looking at porting the Vista engine. I don't know whether the Dragon port exposes a raw API. I'll contact the maintainer.

Sam

[James Mckenzie]

Vitamin, correct me if I am wrong, but if I own a legitimate copy of Vista, it is not stealing. I
specifically stated in my post that a large number of Linux users will posess legitimate copies of
Vista.

So why are you saying it is stealing? Pray enlighten me.

Let one of the lurkers here detail why what you describe is stealing:

It is illegal to use any patented technology in a manner that is not approved by the patent holder. Thus recreating any of the patented technology used by the Vista Speech recognition software without the permission of Microsoft can and probably will end up in several courts. Microsoft has been known to use legal tactics to shutdown competition. This project, Wine, attempts to not use any technology that Microsoft has patented. If you don't like this, blame the society in which we live. The basic term for using patented technology without license is called Stealing. Thus, we cannot support, for legal reasons, what you desire. The Wine project is working on supporting Dragon Naturally Speaking, because it does not require duplication of any patented technology and for DNS 10, Wine does a very good job of supporting it.

Sadly, for those stuck with Vista, Wine will not be able to include that technology.

Other projects may decide that it is worth pursuing work on this project so that it may come to pass on operating systems that are not created by Microsoft. This is called commercial enterprise, and they may have to pay Microsoft for licenses. They may or may not decide to challange Microsoft in court. Microsoft may decide that they will issue free licenses. However, I don't think that they will support a direct competitor to their flagship and money making product (that is my opinion based upon many years on this planet.) You are free to pursue a FOSS product that may or may not integrate with Wine. That is your decision.

Sam wrote:
1. Many people have copies of Vista. It comes with nearly every new PC. Many linux users will have a Vista DVD. The same is not true for Dragon.

You are required to buy Vista? I don't think so. I don't have Vista, I don't want it and I will not have it. I own a Mac, in fact several of them. I have no need to get Vista as the operating system that comes with them works just fine for me.

And Vitamin may be a little harsh, but he does mean well and states consisely what I took many words to say: Wine cannot and most likely will not support any Microsoft patented technology for many reasons.

James McKenzie