14 DAY TRIAL // Simon, an open-source speech recognition program that replaces the mouse and keyboard and that is designed to be very flexible, allowing customization for any application where speech recognition is needed, is now at version 0.4.0.
The development of Simon is progressing slowly, but in the end it will help senior citizens chat, write e-mails, surf the Internet, do Internet-banking and much more.
Highlights of Simon 0.4.0:
• This latest version features a whole new recognition layer, context-awareness for improved accuracy and performance, and a dialog system able to hold whole conversations with the user; • The main window of Simon has been reorganized to bring the most important options together in one screen; • The newly introduced Simon base model format (.sbm) and the integration of a GHNS online repository of base models have removed the last big hurdle of the initial configuration; • Support for the BSD licensed CMU SPHINX has been integrated; • The Voxforge project has been working for years towards GPL acoustic models for a variety of languages and the English Voxforge model is of course available as a Simon base model and can be downloaded and imported with Simon; • Users will also have the option to contribute their gathered Simon training samples directly to the Voxforge server; • The application can now re-configure itself on-the-fly as the current situation changes; • A new dialogue system has been implemented; • A “Simonoid” is now provided for the KDE Plasma workspace; • A new sample review tool called Afaras, integration with the Sequitur grapheme to phoneme framework, an Akonadi command plugin, are just a few of the improvements made to the new version.
A complete list of changes can be found in the official announcement. Download Simon 0.4.0 right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.