[vram22]

If not confidential, can you describe what kinds of automation you used this for, particularly the desktop automation?

I was interested in automating transcription to text of my own reminders to myself and other such audio files, say taken on the PC or on a portable voice recorder, hence the earlier trials I did. But at the time nothing worked out well enough, IIRC.

[lovelearning]

Nothing confidential at all :). I was playing with them because I personally don't like using keyboard and mouse, and also have some ideas for making computing easier for handicapped people.

My current desktop automation is doing command recognition. Commands like "open editor / email / browser", "shutdown", "suspend"...about 20 commands in all. 'pocketsphinx_continuous' is started as a daemon at startup and keeps listening in the background (I'm on Ubuntu).

I think from a speech recognition internals point of view transcription is more complex than recognizing these short command phrases. The training or adaptation corpus would have to be much larger than what I used.

[vram22]

Thanks. Good uses.

He he, the voice "shutdown" command you mention reminds me of a small assembly language routine that I used to use to reboot MSDOS PCs; it was just a single instruction to jump to the start of the BIOS (cold?) boot entry point, IIRC (JMP F000:FFF0 or something like that). Used to enter it into DOS's DEBUG.COM utility with the A command (for Assemble) and then write it out to disk as a tiny .COM file. (IOW, you did not even need an assembler to create it.)

Then you could reboot the PC just by typing:

REBOOT

at the DOS prompt.

Did all kinds of tricks of the trade (not just like that, many other kinds), in the earlier DOS and (more in) UNIX days ... Good fun, and useful to customers, many a time, too, including saving their bacon (aka data) multiple times (with, of course, no backups by them).