iPhone App › Add voice recognition? [closed]

Question

I'd like to build an app that uses voice recognition. I've seen big companies like Google etc implement this feature, but I'm curious about doing it on a start-up level. Anyone looked into this? Are there any tools out there for us to do this?

Chiffon

i think you need to provide more details - what you want the app to do, etc... – Plaything

If you are looking to ad Voice to Text control to your iPhone then read this thread surreystore.com/cms/technology/7-apple/… – Hunkydory

Answer 1

OpenEars looks promising... http://www.politepix.com/openears/

Based on Pocket Sphinx.

Shabby

Answer 2

If you start here at wikipedia, you'll get a good list engines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_recognition#Commercial_software.2Fmiddleware)

As I write this (June 24, 2009) it looks to me that are two viable open source solutions

• Pocket Sphinx (http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/pocketsphinx)
• Julius (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_(software))

Both have been used in iphone apps, but the iphone friendly source isn't readily available.

As I edit this (8 July, 2009) I recently learned that Loquendo (http://www.loquendo.com/en/) has voice recognition and speech synthesis (ASR & TTS) for the iphone.

Garnet

@Rohrer, Will Apple approve this if we add any external engines for the voice recognition – Petronille

@Shibin - I've never heard of such apps being rejected, and I wouldn't expect them to be, either, but your mileage may vary. You can always search around for users of a particular sdk and make sure their apps are actually being published. This would be particularly easy with the commercial sdks. – Garnet

Answer 3

The best approach will probably be to:

1. Record the voice on the phone
2. Send the recording to a server that runs the speech recognition software
3. Then return something to the phone to indicate what it should do

Ibert

That's a lot of data to send. I might try it on the iPhone itself. After all, PCs could do a fair job of this 10 years ago, so perhaps iPhones should be able to now. – Congratulatory

This is actually the technique the Google Search app uses – Undercoating

Google encodes the voice in a special way, they don't just send the raw audio data for exactly the reason Nosredna gave. – Emaciation

There's nothing stopping step 2 from including compression. – Embryonic

Answer 4

The Dragon Mobile SDK from Nuance does what is asked for. You need an internet connection to be able to send the audio to Nuance's server and you get a list of text responses. You can then decide what to do with the text responses (e.g. ask your user to choose the one he meant or perform some action). Here is the link:

http://dragonmobile.nuancemobiledeveloper.com/

Osteoclasis