Subject: Re: Any info on speech recognition in China?

From: Qiang Wan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 May 90 21:30:57 PDT

When I was working on Recognition of Printed Chinese Characters in the
CS&E Dept of Qinghua University, another group was working on
recognition of spoken Chinese, and yet one other grad in the
Wu2Xian4Dian4 Dept was working on Chinese speaking system. The speech
recognition group was using Apple IIe computer. The project later
passed a "Ministry Level Appraisal" and, according to official news
broadcast, was adopted in the Beijing 114 telephone number index
assistance system. I am not sure if 114 operators in Beijing are still
using this system though.
The guy in the Radio Engr Dept assembled a system using a PC clone
(if I remember correctly). When I was paying a visit, the machine
was reading Li3 Bai2's poems. ("The moonlight was shining at the
bedside...")
The speech recognition system suffered high failure rate. The fact
is, you'll have to "train" it virtually every time you want to
use it. The joke that the group had was that system would recognize
your voice in the morning and it would reject you in the afternoon;
it would recognize your happy voice, but would be confused the
minute you change your mood. I would not be surprised if the newly
introduced system behaved the same way.
FYI, the first similar news I heard about "wonderful speech recog-
nition system" was back in the late 70's, when a computer could
recognize its developer's voice input of math formula. The news
was carried on TV. The designer had a heavy accent. The computer
printed out a "+" sign when the gentleman read Jia4-Rang. I am
sure that if anybody said Jia1-Shang4, the system would crash.

Based on my limited experience, the stage of current speech
recognition systems in China are similar to those that are supposed
to predict earthquakes. Rumor has it that China predicted the
San Francisco earthquake, and informed the U.S. government.

wan qiang