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Consonants Not Required 139

Posted by michael from the ruh-roh-shaggy dept.
billybob2001 writes: "A report at the BBC explains how voice-control of computers can be more successful using grunts and sighs, as "voice recognition programs often failed to accurately capture words". Dr Takeo Igarashi, of Brown University suggests the use of "ahhhh" for skipping tracks on a cd, or adjusting tv volume, but I wonder what the effect would be on pr0n sites? Another suggestion is "uh oh" for undo. Perfect for online banking. Is this going to confuse your system or what?"
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Consonants Not Required More

Consonants Not Required

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  • Undo command (Score:5, Funny)

    by Shafalus ( 181224 ) on Thursday October 18, 2001 @07:47AM (#2446057) Homepage
    Surely "Ah, shit!" is the obvious choice for an undo command?
  • Now, whenever you yell you YIEEEE! in a shower because the water is too hot or cold, it will immediatly switch to a more pleasant temperature!
    • And that would be hotter or colder? That must be one hell of a clever shower to decide on one and the same yell if you mean "too hot" or "too cold". Knowing the state of most household technololgy, when you yell "YIEEEE" (too hot), your shower will undoubtedly give you hotter water, after which you can peel your skin right of you're back.
    • Well the best solution to this is to get rid of your giant water heater and replace it with one of the flash heaters with a digital temperature
      control. These are really common in Japan and Hong Kong (surely elsewhere too). They are more economical, give you water heated to your desired temperature almost instantly, and you never run out of perfectly heated water.

  • Help Desk (Score:5, Insightful)

    by well_jung ( 462688 ) on Thursday October 18, 2001 @07:49AM (#2446066) Homepage
    Anyone that's worked at a Help Desk should know that Users have been trying this for years.

    • Does it handle expletives?

      Can you imagine the Microsoft ad? "Now talk to the computer *the way you've always wanted to*. IntelliSense handles all forms of four letter words..."

  • More reasons to talk dirty to my sexy computer. Now if only I could get Carmen Electra's talking back to me...

  • Tarzan producing a buffer overflow. How long before a script kiddie rips its yell into an mp3?
  • But this isn't what I dream about doing on the bridge of the Enterprise D. Instead of saying "Computer, Tea, Early Grey, Hot" I'd say something like "Oooh, Ahhhh, Grrrr"

    I dont think so.

  • Can you imagine the office environment... OU, OU, OU, EE, EE, EE!!
  • Like the article says, it'd be impossible to get people to use that in the office... I certainly wouldn't.

    As well as that, if this did take off, can you imagine the implications for language: grunts, moans and sighs would become ubiquitous in everyday conversation... :)

    Al.
  • When your computer starts taking verbal abuse it should turn itself off. That way you when you rip the bugger out of the wall you won't have to fsck the hard disk once you calm down.

  • It just does. Who the hell wants to talk to their computer anyway? What we need is a direct neural interface. Oh yeah baby..

  • Self Destruct (Score:3, Funny)

    by stinkydog ( 191778 ) <sd@noSPAM.strangedog.net> on Thursday October 18, 2001 @07:57AM (#2446099) Homepage

    Just don't say Mua'dib or the computer explodes.

    -He has the weirding way.

  • It's cute, but... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by d5w ( 513456 ) on Thursday October 18, 2001 @07:57AM (#2446100)
    The computer can't distinguish words easily, so we'll give you a potentially much smaller vocabulary and see if it does better? Of course it'll do better, whether or not that smaller vocabulary contains consonants.

    What I'd worry about is whether these unarticulated sounds sound more like background noise than articulated speech; if so, then you've made the situation worse by making it harder for the computer to know when you're talking to it.

    On "uh oh": Dragon Dictate (discrete speech recognition from a few years ago) used "oops" for telling the SR system when it made a mistake; it was reasonably easy to distinguish from words that you actually wanted to put into your text with any frequency.
    • well, yuo are actually not quite correct on the consonant thing. ever try doing an FFT on some sound, and keeping only the major frequencies? we humans hear consonants, but for example p and b are essentially the same thing. and in the case of say, an S, its sound like noice to the computer, making it harder to distinguish than when an AAA makes one distinct frequency. So, although yuo are correct in saying that a smaller vocabulary would help, not as much as removing cononants.

      • Re:It's cute, but... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by plastik55 ( 218435 )
        FFT is exactly the wrong technique for resolving transient or plosive sounds. Wavelets work better. Take the CWT of a person speaking, and you can *see* the shape of all the consonants.

        When people speak, it is the consonants that matter. Ever try listening closely to someone with a pronounced regional accent? The vowels are all jumbled up but the speech is still intelligible. IIRC, people tried to teach gorillas to communicate using different grunts, and gave up in favor of sign language. Reason being that you *can't* string two different vowels together without a consonant in between and have it be intelligible.

    • not only that, but imagine the havoc when your child decided to watch telletubbies while your trying to do something on your computer..
    • When making vowel sounds, your vocal tract is essentially an uniform tube. This is really easy for a computer to model (as another poster mentioned, a simple FFT), as opposed to ficatives and plosives, which involves contrictions in the vocal tract that are harder to model (since the effect they have on the sound signal is to not make it complety sinusoidal).
  • The letter 'h' is a consonant.
  • It could be "Ahhhhhh! Uh-oh!" for some people, seeing as how they've just made their keyboard a little more, eh, dirty.
  • Maybe if they combined this grunt recognition system with some kind of brain-wave recognition system we could have something. We could all revert to being neadrathals.

  • No, this is serious academic research! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 18, 2001 @08:02AM (#2446115)

    Seriously. I have colleagues that work on this type of thing:

    "Sound Symbolism in Conversational Grunts in English"
    "The Challenge of Non-lexical Speech Sounds"
    "Issues in the Transcription of English Conversational Grunts"

    http://www.sanpo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~nigel/publicatio ns.html [u-tokyo.ac.jp]

  • Tim Allen will love this (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Thursday October 18, 2001 @08:04AM (#2446120) Homepage Journal
    Of course, many have said that the GUI is a "caveman interface" - point and grunt, err, click.

    This really strikes me as the verbal equivelent of Palm's Grafitti - if normal interactions (printing/speaking) is too hard, make a simplified interface (Grafitti/grunting) that isn't.

    I don't know, but I already learned one interface (typing) to make my computer's life easier. Why should I do all the work?
    • I don't know, but I already learned one interface (typing) to make my computer's life easier. Why should I do all the work?
      This is probably the single biggest problem that large-vocabulary speech recognition had and has in getting adopted, even where it's a good fit: it requires you to learn to use it rather than "just talking". Some people say "I already learned one interface..." Even more have simply forgotten how long it took them to get comfortable with a keyboard and compare the pain of a new interface to the habit of years.

      Any new interface requires some accomodation from the user.

      • Re:Typing vs. speech (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Asic Eng ( 193332 )
        Any new interface requires some accomodation from the user.

        Ok, that sounds fair, but I guess you'd want to have some sort of benefit after you invest your time?

        I just don't see this sort of interface to catch on for standard applications. I mean - imagine you are in an office with 20 people grunting at their computers, the noise they make is just going to be unbearable. That's got to be worse than that annoying guy who's checking his voicemail via speaker phone. *shudder*

        From the article:

        By increasing the pitch of your voice, the scrolling speed increases. When you stop speaking, the scrolling ends.

        Can you imagine sitting next to a guy who uses this, and not have a headache after 10 mins?

        • I think that speach recognition as a computer interface would be very powerful for the following reason:

          In general (yes, there are exceptions), GUI's excel at bringing a greater density of information from the computer to the user, while command line technologies are better at delivering a greatly enhanced level of information density from the user to the computer. I remember trying to go from a command line FTP to WS-FTP and going RIGHT BACK because it made "simple" tasks like downloading a file to a floppy disk but as a different name and making it FAR more complicated.

          The advantage of a speach interface is that theoretically, you have at nearly as much information density going to the computer as you do from the command line, and it does not conflict with the GUI.

          Of course this argument also works for X-term...
          • I think that speach recognition as a computer interface would be very powerful for the following reason:

            I don't know if an "Auditory OS" would ever take off for one simple reason...we all make mistakes. can you imagine how hard it would be to dictate a paper to your computer, even if its speech recognition was perfect?

            "Computer networks have assisted...uh no. Computer networks assist...no...fuck, delete all that."

            All of a sudden, you've got a page full of junk and mutterings that you have to go over with the keyboard anyway. What's the point?

    • Perhaps in the future we'll all:

      Type in soundbites (thanks to email)
      Write like small children (thanks to Palm, emoticons)
      Speak like cavemen (thanks to voice recognition)
      Observe like small, hyper monkeys (thanks to television)

      ...and eventually regress to thinking like Neanderthals
    • I don't know, but I already learned one interface (typing) to make my computer's life easier. Why should I do all the work? Exactly! Wasn't the whole point of voice recognition to make computers interact with humans the same way we interact with each other? Lets be realistic... the reason Palm uses Graffiti is because the keyboard was too small to use... not because it recognizes handwriting so well. Graffiti does not satisfy the goals of handwriting recognition, and this technology does not satisfy the goals of voice recognition.

  • I know what I want ... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by HiQ ( 159108 )
    I don't believe in the necessity of a voice operated computer. At the risk of reopening a very old discussion, a good command line will do better in most cases. It takes far less time (for a skilled person) to use a command than to explain the desired action in 'normal' language to a computer. I mean 'rm -r /*' is typed in a lot faster than saying: "Go to the root directory and delete every file, including all subdirectories".
  • In related news, police have closed in on a suspect believed to be responsible for creating the Code Sex virus that crippled thousands of systems across the net last week.

    When asked about the virus the unidentified man responded "It's not my fault! I didn't to it intentionally. All I was doing was surfing my favorite pr0n sites and, well, you know, enjoying myself, when all these windows started popping up! At first I thought it was the usual spam trick - but no, this code just started appearing everywhere. It just sort of created itself... really! You've gotta believe me!"

    The investigation continues.

  • Hmmm..so i get a scientific basis/reason for my misprounciation,mangling of grammar,absolutely incorrect spellings and other atrocities.

    In other words i acn now sodomize Queen's english with scientific approval!!

  • Ooo...eee.. (Score:2, Funny)

    by thewiz ( 24994 )
    "Ooo eee ooo ah ah, ting tang walla walla, bing bang"

    A line from "The Witch Doctor" by David Seville or voice command to shutdown Windows? Decide for yourself by playing it for your voice recognition software.

  • mics (Score:1, Troll)

    by zephc ( 225327 )
    i dont know if its how it is done now, but why isnt there a single-button that you press that would activate the mic to accept voice commands, and maybe a second to input text... its not totally hands free, but if Stephen Hawking could talk, even HE could use it :P

  • singing ditties for commands (Score:3, Funny)

    by peter303 ( 12292 ) on Thursday October 18, 2001 @08:10AM (#2446140)
    Its easier to recognize tonal changes than constanants. Its easier for humns to use full words than isolated vowels.
  • I spent the last ten minutes with a bad case of the hiccups. What do you think that would have done to my weekly report?

  • Ahhhh (Score:3, Funny)

    by garoush ( 111257 ) on Thursday October 18, 2001 @08:14AM (#2446157) Homepage
    Now there is a whole new meaning to "Yada, yada, yada, ..."
  • For a while now, I've been looking for a certain sound from Cartoon Network, but no one seems to have it. Any suggestions?
    The sound I'm looking for is from the Toonami segue to/from commercials, right after the beat stops there is this whistle like sound (I'd imitate it, but something tells me that wouldn't work). I'm looking for that whistle like sound, so if anybody knows where I might find respond to this comment.
    • 1) run wire from TV headphone out to soundcard
      2) record sequence with whistle in it to wav
      3) cut off what you don't need

      No I dont have it, but I used to do this to get certain song-samples.. some 10 years ago..

      //rdj
  • After 30,000 years of having good comminucation skills, humans' finally revert to pre-historic communications skills. Their technology is responsible for thier de-cevilization. It seems a computer interface consisting of only grunts and primitive sounds was selected for windowsXP, and as a result the entire human vocabulary has reverted back to pre-historic roots.

    Bill gates said "We are proud to be responsible for the conversion to a much easier language. While XML can organize our data better, we needed a common language for human interaction. Leveraging our power on the desktop, we we able to achive this." When asked about how aliens might perceive our change of language, Gates repsonded "I'm sure that they will appreciate the simplicity more. I mean, who ever liked French and all of it's eligance anyway?"

    Grunt snort grr grr.

  • "Wachooooooooo!"

    Computer reboots...
  • This is nothing more than a bridge or a quick fix until full "get your word-on recognition" is in place. Kind of like learning a keyboard until you can talk to your machine...
  • I ..i.. ..a. ..i. i. a .a.u.a. .a. .o .o..u.i.a.e

    .oo. e.e...o.. .i.. .e .a..i.. .i.e ..i.!
  • About 20 years ago, a whistling code for robot control was suggested.

    It's pretty easy to detect several frequencies of whistles, so command can be made from sequences of whistling. It was pointed out that high-low sequences would be easiest (rather than combinations of 3 or more tones), as individual people could use what was high-low tones for them rather than trying to train humans to have better pitch control.

    • I can picture myself working behind my computer, eating cookies (or whatever), and giving the computer a whistled command, and getting up to get of box of tissues to wipe the wet crumbs of my screen. I really don't think it will work...
  • Just whatever you do, do NOT take your computer to the monkey house. It'll probably self-destruct!
  • Over the hills and far away, Teletubbies come to hack!

    Eh-oh!

    Uh-ehn! Uh-ehn!

    Time for tubby shutdown...

    Uh-oh...
  • Apple's OS9 has had an extension called Speakable Items which is fun to play with ("Open file... I said 'Open file!' dangit!") but far from useful.

    It's just the next step in making the usage of a computer more "user friendly" and thereby utterly inefficient. Typing vi kane/rosebud.text is so much faster than double-clicking on the folder kane and then on the file rosebud.text, and by far faster than saying "Show Speakable commands. Open folder Kane. Open folder Kane. Open folder Kane. Finally! Open file Rosebud dot text. Open file Rosebud dot text. Open file Rosebud period text..." Now, if you don't even use real language but only grunts, it becomes even worse. Talking about "Disneyfication" [cryptonomicon.com]! Or rather, alienation of the work process [eserver.org].

  • would playing a recording of ambient jungle sounds (monkeys grunting) could your system be h4x0r3d by the l337 5K|113d /\/\0nK3yz
  • Asking people to use another language when dealing with machines -- especially one that's more visceral -- is just asking for trouble. Already computers are seriously affecting the ability of humans to communicate orally, by concentrating the language into short bursts used during chats we lose the particles of sentences that help establish context in speech (yes, there is a reason for "the" and "a"). Besides, here's an oppurtunity to elleviate a lot of the bad habits that make dialectic English so tough to understand for those outside the dialect: set the machines to understand one sort of English, so that everybody has to speak at least that type along with their colloquial speech. Of course, there's always the possibility for eugenic practices with this, so my proposal is this: teach the computer the differences between the 8 vowel sounds used by people in Colorado, where pretty much every vowel approaches the schwa (the schwa being the neutral position for the human vocal system and therefore easiest to pronounce). After a while, people will realise that to be successful at using voice activated systems, they'll need to adjust their inflection, and after a while will adjust it automatically when dealing with people who don't understand them, either.

    But voice activated systems are stupid, anyway...speech is one of the slowest forms of human interaction, and is one of the few we have to actively concentrate on to perform. You know when people say, "Think before you speak?" That's because once you start speaking a large portion of your brain activity is devoted to doing so...it actually becomes harder to think about what to say next. Pressing a button or turning a dial takes practically no thought...which is another reason why a speech written in spontaneous draft still sounds better than one that is spoken aloud. If we convert machines to speach recognition, we're effectively asking people to interact with them in dumber ways. And can you imagine the logic involved with processing a fairly simple statement like "This check in my hand should be processed by you and in return i'd like fifty bucks in tens and ten one dollar bills." Since the command isn't linear, the machine not only has to recognize what each word means, but try and interpret them in queue. And if humans can't construct complicated sentences like the one above -- which any human over the age of about 4 can understand, before that kids can't identify the subject and object in complex sentences -- they'll be inconvenienced by speaking machines. Oh and for a simpler example, try this: "My pin number? 376 uhhhhhh...Forty-two thirteen...aaaaaaaaaaaand...is it six? no. Eight?...oh! oh! sixty eight!" A human can understand that...we'd be annoyed, but we'd get it.
    • But voice activated systems are stupid, anyway...speech is one of the slowest forms of human interaction, and is one of the few we have to actively concentrate on to perform.
      You're faulting speech by comparing full-out, general spoken natural language to much more restricted modes of input, like a button or dial. The spoken equivalents of a button or dial can be as quick and easy as the tactile versions, and with very little practice they become just as automatic. Speech isn't the right input method for everything, but then neither is the keyboard, the mouse, the pen, or the steering wheel. Computer-targeted speech is good, and worth putting some effort into, when:
      • You need to quickly select from a very large, known list of options; you very quickly hit the point where speech is way faster than mouse, dial or stylus.
      • You need to do something with text and a keyboard just isn't feasible for size, convenience or portability reasons. Speech input of text is almost invariably faster than a stylus.
      • Your hands are busy, remote (from the device, though I suppose also if they're remote from you) or incapacitated. "Remote" in this case includes "at the other end of a phone call".
      • You're dealing with with text that's sufficiently uniform that you can speak at full speed, in which case you're going faster than almost everyone types. (And there are contexts where that occurs.)
    • "If we convert machines to speach recognition, we're effectively asking people to interact with them in dumber ways."

      Uh huh.

  • Background noises deleted my HDD! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by glebite ( 206150 ) on Thursday October 18, 2001 @08:47AM (#2446281)

    How selective would the speech recognition be? If I was playing musing on that computer, would the computer pick up the tones coming in and start "doing stuff(tm)" on my computer? What about background noises? My friend's Jello Biafra spoken word CDs?

    I won't even go there with my Saturday Morning Cartoon CD - Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah (This means mail all of my friends a copy of my resume)...

  • just for the heck of it, is interface the voice synthesis output of one computer to the voice recognition interface of another and start a transfer of a large text file just to see how long it takes and how accurate it is. I might get about 10-20 bps thru phone line.

    If they start standardizing on a vowel command system and people overcome the embarassment of using it, how long before SharperImage starts selling little boxes that make the same sounds at the push of a button, to, you know, make life even better?
  • Yea! Umm! Zhkxw! Fwpfpfuuu!
    We have already mangled the natural language and
    created a bunch of programming languages.
    Now this new effort requires standardization.
    Just imagine the video tape learning new voice features of Windows 2XXX !
    Open file - Off!
    Close file - Buff!
    Save file - Grm!Grm!

    Imagine teachers telling students how to
    properly pronounce the "Set preferences" (PfGfGrrf!)

    Imagine "holy wars" between adherents of
    MicroQuack(tm) and FreeGrunt(GPL).

    That's our future.

    PS. Don't forget international sighs !
  • Lojban is designed to be used by people in communication with each other, and possibly in the future with computers.


    http://lojban.org/ [lojban.org]

    Don't wait until Microsoft releases their version.
  • What they're not saying here explicitly is that they still haven't come up with a waveform recognition / microphone setup that they can implement in "normal" usage situations, and still have it recognize consonants with voice and without. The voiced plosive "b" and the voiceless plosive "p", for example, just sound too damn alike.

    I think rather than manipulate our computers using "oooh" and "ahh" and "Oh shit!".... perhaps we should just restructure the English language?

  • A potential timeline: (Score:5, Funny)

    by Noer ( 85363 ) on Thursday October 18, 2001 @09:11AM (#2446419)
    2020: Computers everywhere are controlled by grunts, moans, sighs, and snorts.

    2040: Computers are finally small enough that they're all embedded into our environments, but neural interfaces don't work, so we still grunt and snort into our computers, but it looks like we're just grunting and snorting in general. People use computers exclusively, and never talk to one another; thus, language is lost and we just grunt and snort a lot.

    2060: aliens visit hoping to find intelligent life, but instead find a bunch of snorting, grunting apes. They leave.
  • You don't want the Teletubbies on if you've got this setup.
  • What if I accidentally leave my computer on while having sex with my girlfriend - it may take my vocal signals as a que to fire up my mpeg porn collection. The rapid and violent removal of my genitals is sure to follow . . .
  • Dr Takeo Igarashi, of Brown University suggests the use of "ahhhh" for skipping tracks on a cd, or adjusting tv volume

    As a Boston-area resident, I'd like to suggest that this choice of sound wouldn't work for us:

    "Hey paahl, gahhhttah go pahhk my caah." *CD skips 4 tracks*

    You'd figure the guy works for a New England university, he might've picked up on that. How about "y'all" instead?

    • We're well known for stretching every vowel into several syllables. "Well" comes out "way-uhl" and a long "I" sounds like "ah." Every time one referred to oneself, the TV or CD would start skipping around.

      "Way-uhl, Ah doan know wut Ah'm gonna do. Mah CD keeps skippin'. Wut are y'all gonna do?"

      Here we are at the peak of the greatest technological revolution the world has ever known, and this guy wants us to go back to communicating with grunts and moans.

      What would Rain-in-the-Face do?

  • "He wouldn't have written 'ahhhhh,' to skip tracks on his CD player."

    "Maybe he was dictating."
  • Pick up the mike and say "Waaaaaazzaaaaaaaaaappp"

  • Tourette's GUI (Score:2, Funny)

    by gelfling ( 6534 )
    Clicks, wheezes, pops, random onscenities. Sounds like the way I interract with my computer NOW!

  • I think Neal Stephenson (in Snow Crash) had a disabled guy controlling his wheelchair/truck by making grunts and other noises. The idea always made sense to me.

  • Sheep (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Kpechtunx ( 529353 )
    Sound kind of like how a farmer controls a sheepdog ... - !K
  • Great, let's get a roomful of people trying to control their PCs, and it'll sound something like this:

    Ooo, Eee, Ooo, Ahh ahh,
    Ting, Tang, Walla walla bing bang.
  • Steps to mess with your friends (or enemies)

    1)Install this and set it up so that this starts up when windows does.

    2) Set a sound to shutdown Windows

    3) Record that sound and set it to play whenever windows starts or whenever there is an error.

    4)loop the sound output into the input.

    5) sit back and enjoy watching them turn on there computer only for it to grunt and turn off on them.

    *note* Don't know if all of this would be possible but I just had to share this thought

  • Undo (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Fjord ( 99230 ) on Thursday October 18, 2001 @01:11PM (#2447744) Homepage Journal
    Great. I'm almost finished my ultra-long /. post and someone ICQs me.

    "Uh oh"

    On another note, I knew a guy who worked with voice rec software where the delete-word command was "oops". Whenever he would watch another person typing and they would typo, he would instinctively say "oops". I'm guessing it's kind of how my writting went bad went I was using graffiti a lot. You get used to these quirky mannerisms you use to control the machines. Then you end up looking like a dork and annoying the people around you
  • There is no need for this. Voice recognition already works. And it works well. And it already works with REAL words. No need to grunt, squeal of burp into your microphone.

    I first used voice recognition software with OS/2 4.0 on a P100 with 16MB. I was amazed at how well it worked. Of course, 16Mb was inadequate for dictation, but even with that puny system I had it trained in half and hour.

    There's a reason that voice recognition hasn't caught on. It's not because it doesn't work. It's because people don't want to talk to their computers. It's embarassing. It's not convenient. It's awkward to say those commands that computers need, like "arrem minus arref slash star".

  • Sex (Score:2, Funny)

    by ZaneMcAuley ( 266747 )
    And during sex the entire house becomes a party place (lamp on, lamp off, hifi on , hifi off ....) a:D
  • You could run the voice recognition system as a vital resource, so when the system crashes, you go "[Zarking] [buggering] [smegging] Windows!" and it installs Linux automatically. Good idea, right?
  • This is not (meant to be) a troll, so please bear with me.

    English is just such a hard language to pronounce consistently. It's not the consonants -- it's the fact that we have to pronounce consonants that are not followed by vowels.
    Think about that for a while. Then say the word 'eighths'. Notice the 'g-h-t-h-s', in which the g and the h are not pronounced, but the t, h, and s are -- as two syllables in fact!
    Even words like 'what', contain that ending consonant that is pronounced, but is very hard to pick up.
    Some people claim that English is a phonetic language, but only barely if it is at all.

    I use Dragon Dictate/Naturally Speaking, and I get around a 95% recognition rate. You have no idea how surprising that is!!!
    That actually is only slightly less than what people can do. Of course we don't need to actually hear every word correctly.

    So what we all need to do is to speak a decent language, maybe Esperanto :) where each word is pronounce consistently from the written word, and each word is distinct and each syllable contains a vowel.
    Of course my vote is for Mandarin Chinese -- each word is exactly one syllable long; there is no pause at the end of words, only sentences; each syllable is either a vowel or a consonant followed by a vowel; words are distiguished by intonations (which is easily picked up by any speech recognition software); and there is no conjugation! (that means there is no be/is/am/are/been/being, no infinitives (to go) to split, no silly grammar like 'Where do you live?' where the sentence goes object-subject-verb, etc...)
    Of course the written language has to go...50,000 distinct characters *grumble grumble*.

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