What are my options for Mandarin and Cantonese speech recognition software?
November 10, 2009 12:05 AM 
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What are my options for Mandarin and Cantonese speech recognition software?
I've found the PenPower Cantonese VoiceWriter (using the IBM ViaVoice engine), but that's about it. Too bad Dragon NaturallySpeaking doesn't have a version for Chinese. Hopefully some of you might know of other Mandarin / Cantonese speech recognition software?
posted by querty to computers & internet (1 comment total)
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VoiceInsert ActiveX SDK 3.3 from United Research Labs link here for Cnet's download page
It claims to offer recognition of 60,000 words (English/Chinese) dictation; it's free to try but $399 to buy. The previous version (2.5) was fairly highly rated on the site, but this version isn't yet rated. The nice thing about downloading from CNet is that it's tested spyware free.
I followed the link to the company's web site, and interestingly, they offer a .wav to text product for only $39 here, so if you're willing to record speech rather than do it live, you could save some serious money.
I also searched on the Microsoft Office site using the terms "speech recognition Chinese" with results here.
Features vary a lot between software versions. Apparently you can install speech recognition in Office 2003 to select commands as well as to do dictation in simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese characters. 2007 doesn't support this feature, but Vista has speech recognition features built in.
While looking for more information about Microsoft support for Chinese speech recognition (specifically how well it recognized Mandarin vs Cantonese and other dialects), I found this product which claims to integrate Microsoft's speech-to-text features for Chinese speech recognition and translation.
Just browsing about it looks like support for Cantonese is a bit spottier than for Mandarin all over. There were lots of links found in a Google search on "Chinese speech recognition software", but I don't go downloading stuff off of just any site online!
It might be considerably more difficult to find something non-Windows or open-source.
I hope this helps. Good luck!
posted by caffron at 8:34 AM on November 10, 2009