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Mind / Iron
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by Bryan Bergeron, Editor
PUBLISHER
Larry Lemieux
publisher@servomagazine.com
I just finished listening to book
one of Kevin Anderson’s Saga of
Seven Suns, in which robots play a
central role. In the story, the Klikiss
robots are highly intelligent,
multi-limbed bug-like creatures
that communicate with other robots
using digital data streams and with
humans via speech. The tale
reminded me that at least one
perception of intelligent robots
revolves around the power of speech.
Unfortunately, progress in
robotic speech is relatively stagnant.
Speech synthesis has been a mature
technology for decades, and
advances in large vocabulary,
continuous speech recognition seems
to have hit a wall in the late 1990s.
This is in part because the projected
multi-billion dollar market for
PC-based speech recognition
document processing products never
materialized. Today, few people even
take notice of the speech recognition
software available for the PC and
Mac – and most hate the speech
recognition systems used by the
automated attendants employed by
the airlines and credit card industries.
Despite the mystique of “AI”
surrounding speech recognition,
speech recognition software that
you can purchase for your PC/Mac
works by simply matching spectral
templates of sounds and using tables
of likely word sequences to build
sentences. For example, if you say
“ball,” the speech recognition
software would identify likely
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Bryan Bergeron
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CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Jeff Eckert Tom Carroll
Gordon McComb David Geer
Dennis Clark R. Steven Rainwater
Fred Eady Kevin Berry
Bryce Woolley Evan Woolley
Andrew Alter Phil Malone
Michael Simpson Samuel Mishal
John Blankenship Kevin McCullough
Ray Billings Mike Jeffries
Charles Guan Robert Farrow
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Tracy Kerley
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Figure 1
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Brian Kirkpatrick
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Michael Kaudze
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Shannon Lemieux
Joe Keungmanivong
ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT
Debbie Stauffacher
Mind/Iron Continued
6 SERVO 11.2008
Copyright 2008 by
T & L Publications, Inc.
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