Linux dictation/speech recognition
October 8, 2006
Using Linux is, at different times, both frustrating and freeing. My experiences over the years switching between OSX, Windows and Linux have been numerous, and I still tend to find myself coming back to Linux. It’s often because much of the work I do ends up running on LAMP based servers, so running LAMP locally makes it easy to know that what I’m doing will work in the final production system. If I worked for a large company with an unlimited budget, perhaps being MS oriented wouldn’t be so hard, but it’s often the case that where I’m working we simply can’t justify the cost of being 100% MS based with respect to all our technology. Yet the opportunity cost (in terms of time spent making disparate platforms interoperate) in being a cross platform shop aren’t exactly chicken feed.
These are just a few thoughts that I come back to now and then when looking for needed tech for my Linux machines. Most recently, I’ve been looking for quality (or really ANY!) software that would run under Linux and allow me to take audio files and convert them to text. “Speech to text” or “dictation” software just doesn’t seem to exist for Linux. IBM’s ViaVoice *was* available, but is no longer, and apparently was sold off to a Windows-oriented shop. IBM still apparently retains the rights to the Linux version of ViaVoice, but doesn’t seem to be forthcoming about releasing it. This article seems to have more on the state of things…
I’m not even asking for a ‘free’ or ‘open source’ version. I’d be willing to pay something for a dictation package I could run natively, but it’s one of those things I will need to dual boot for. I was toying with running Windows under VMWare, but I think for something like speech conversion it would not be effective given the CPU and RAM requirements I can imagine.
If I’m missing some obvious way of translating files for Linux, please let me know!
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