Subject: Signing off/Orthogonal functions?

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 27 Apr 90 17:11:20 EDT

Oh yeah, and the serious bit.  I haven't kept up with character & speech
recognition methods much lately.  Does anyone know of anything that's being
done with systems of othogonal functions (like Walsh and Fourier) in those
applications?  (Since we're on the topic, and it does have big ramifications in
Chinese computing.)

     Ben Buckner   BUCKBD@MOREKYPR

Date:         Thu, 26 Apr 90 17:22:58 CDT
From:         Andrew Nulman <[email-masked]>
Subject:      Re: Chinese Spoken-input method
To:           Sluggo <UD154342@NDSUVM1>

I believe spoken-input method is the easiest. However there is one problem
which must be overcome, and that is the standardization of the Mandarin
accents.
   I have heard that people in Taiwan and mainland have begun communicating
by telephone now that there are direct links available, but Beijing and
Taipei people are having trouble communicating with each other in Mandarin!

The advantage of Chinese in developing a phoneme-based system is the fact
that Mandarin only has 4 tones, plus the neutral tone.

Compare this with English.  The standard "newcaster's" accent is pretty much
the same all over the United States and Candada.  I guess a spoken-input
method would have to be localized for England, Ireland, Australia, N.Z, India,
.  Oh , yes, and Southern U.S.!

Japanese will be easier to develop spoken input method more than Chinese or
English.  It has very few phonemes, and is a more monotonal language.

The most difficult language to develop spoken-input method for is English,
because we borrow foreign sounds into our language.  Chinese and Japanese
borrow foreign words too, but don't absorb the foreign phonemes as well.
In this sense, these languages are more pure.

It isn't that urgent to develop spoken input for English, because keyboards are
designed for Roman-based languages.
   But the difficulty of computerizing symbolic languages, especially
ones without an alphabet like Chinese, is what has made technology like
FAX so popular in Asia.

      My prediction is that the first language which will have a usable,
cost-effective voice interpreter will be Japanese.

  Three reasons:  1) R&D funding is there, 2) Demand is strong, 3) the
pronunciation is very standardized, and there aren't a lot of phonemes.

                                 -Andy Nulman