Chinese Speech-to-Text IME

[bredmond812陈秉劲]

Hello,

I try to read materials in Chinese, and I can follow the language, but I have to refer to the dictionary too often, which is tedious even though i have Pleco Dict. If it were all online, I could just use my 'Instant Translator' feature on Dr. Eye, which will translate each word as you roll over it. The problem is that i want to read print materials too. So what I thought i might like is a way to input Chinese characters into an entry field just through speech. That way, I could say hmm, i wonder what ping2guo3 is, so then i could say ping guo, and it would list something like

1. 苹果 2. 平果 3. 平锅 4. 平 5. 瓶 6. 冰果 7. 并扩 8. 病

and i say 1. Or and maybe it has other pages just like in every hanzi text IME i know of so then you could search through the possiblitiies just like you would page down with other IME systems. Also, you could say:

p i n g. end. tone. 2 choose 1,

and it would chose the first word that has the pinyin ping, with the tone 2. or if it was wrong, you could say, no, p i n g...etc. Or you could say po ying ge wo etc. or you could use like five stroke bihua, or whatever. no need to write essays, just so i dont have to keep moving back and forth between my dictionary and my reading material. It gets annoying and I just don't read anymore. Somebody might say, "Hey, that just builds character!" But I am not focused on building my character this way. I want to focus on building my Chinese language level instead.

So the question is: What is the status of development of Hanzi Speech-to-Text IME systems? Are they available?

Brandon

[roddy]

Speech recognition is what you want - technically I have this as part of the Chinese version of Word 2003 or something, but it doesn't work with my internal mike and I don't have an external one. But try a search for Chinese speech recognition and you should get some ideas. But I suspect it'll end up being more trouble that it's worth, at least for just doing look ups - after all, you won't necessarily know what the pronunciation even is. A tablet and hand-writing recognition might be more useful.

[bredmond812陈秉劲]

ok with the new proper name, i will do a search. i was drawing a blank with the speech to text thing. they were giving me text to speech. I guess you could say i have the handwriting recognition thing, considering i use pleco, but i still feel challenged when i often have to put the book down and switch to the dictionary.

thanks for your help

brandon