eDigital MXP100 with Voice Control

An anonymous reader writes: "Here is a lengthy review of eDigital's 1GB flash MP3 portable that is as much a review on Lucent's remarkable speech recognition technology VoiceNav as it is on the player. VoiceNav offers speaker-independent recognition, meaning it doesn't have to learn each individual user's particular speech patterns like IBM's ViaVoice. Just say the name of a music track into the player's microphone and VoiceNav pulls up and plays that song. In ideal conditions the reviewer was able to twice run through a list of 14 song titles without fail. This included titles with "non-real word" band names like Sum41 and U2. Neat technology that could make its way into PDAs soon. The player is a pretty good one too, using IBM's Microdrive for storage."

Re:Filters

[d5w]

Does the voice recognition filter itself out? When U2 sings "one" I don't necessarily want it switching to Aimee Mann's "one" and vice versa

From the review:

Navigation using VoiceNav only operates when a song is not playing (manual controls will allow navigation when a tune is pumping), therefore there is no "Stop" or "Pause" command.

So they punted on that problem.

On another front, tt looks like "one" isn't likely to produce useful responses from the speech recognition in any case. The only times the reviewer seems to have gotten acceptable recognition of track names were when saying the entire artist and title.

Re:What about Ogg Vorbis support?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think we'll see players for Ogg Vorbis until the people behind the format realize that they desperately need to change the name. Unfortunately, (ugh) marketing counts for quite a bit in the real world, and 'Ogg Vorbis' is a name only a geek could love.

And MP3 isn't a geeky name? A player isn't going to lose sales just because it supports a format with a weird name. It's not like Vorbis will be the only format supported - it will still be sold as an "MP3 player".

A free fixed-point decoder would be more helpful than a new name. Fixed-point Vorbis decoders (for ARM processors) exist, but they need to be licensed. Most companies probably couldn't justify the licensing cost, but if it was free, they'd be more likely to add support. At least one company has stated (on the Vorbis mailing list) that they will support Vorbis when a free decoder is available.

There are also rumors that iRiver's MP3 player will support Vorbis in a future firmware upgrade, but I haven't heard much about that.

Playlist with 14 entries isn't enough

[hovik]

In ideal conditions the reviewer was able to twice run through a list of 14 song titles without fail.

This doesn't mean much. To pick the correct one between only 14 possible is quite easy. The reviewer should rather have tried with a playlist with more than 3000 entres. The error rate will grow exponatially with the number of songs, because statisically more song will be phoneticly more equal, the more you add. (bad way to say it, but you prob get the point)

Hype Company

[Anonymous Coward]

edigital has a long history of using hype and grossly misleading tactics to, IMO, defraud investors. So far they've lost tens of millions of dollars, and recently had to resort to taking a loan at a 49% interest rate [bloomberg.com] just to stay in business. Even the CEO has referred to the investors as a "cult".

As for their history with their products, their much-hyped Treo barely sold any units in stores, and is now being sold by liquidators on ebay [ebay.com]. A lot of customers were a bit pissed that their players didn't come with any storage media!

This wasn't intended as flamebait, but E.digital has a long history of using hype and misleading tactics to pursue little more than an incursion of investment money from gullible public investors. I didn't lose any money to them, but a lot of people did, and will continue to.

In fact, they recently registered 20 million more shares [yahoo.com] so they can stay in business a while longer. They really don't deserve this kind of attention from Slashdot.

For those considering investing in them, I'd say stay away. For those considering a product purchase, I'd recommend the same [pcworld.com].

If you don't mind better quality...

[l1nuxhax0r]

you might be interested in the fact that this has already been done [apple.com]

/. story is innaccurate

[acoustix]

No where in the actual article does it say that it uses "1GB flash" cards. However, the IBM microdrive does store that much data (340 MB, 512 MB or 1GB).

As far as I know the "SanDisk-compatible CompactFlash(TM) Cards" max out at 128 MB.

They might want to update the article seeing how it may get some people's hopes up.

Re:Voice Recognition

[marphod]

ACtually, I work in this field.

Dragon, ViaVoice, etc. are dictation recognizers. They work by analyzing the speech data, and attempting to do phoneme matching to generate words, from a huge dictionary, and then do word matching.

This isn't an overly exciting model for different reasons. Large vocabulary recognizers have been around for 8-10 years. Nuance, SpeechWorks, Philips, and Temic end up being the big four in this market, allthough there is also a large vocabulary implementation of ViaVoice and others.

These products take a fixed grammar set, compile them in an speaker-indepedant manner, and can be used to recognize the compiled grammar. Without getting overly techincal, it is a very different speech recognition method than the dictation recognizers, as they aren't trying to recognize everything out of a dictionary, but simply out of what the known grammar is. The flexiblity in how the user can phrase the requests is small, but for relatively simple tasks, its a fine trade off.

Look at SprintPCS's VoiceCommand for example. (I was one of the writters of the product -- not the handset based recognition, but the serverside voice activated dialing solution). The idea is very similar, but we handle the concept a little differently.

This type of device is just waiting to happen. With VoiceXML designing tools like this will be standardized, but its not anything new, just a use of existing technology.