magnus (Mouse Advanced GNU Speech) is born
Posted by atrilla on 15 November, 2007
magnus (Mouse Advanced GNU Speech) is a speech controlled mouse pointer application through Catalan voice commands. This application aims to provide oral accessibility for people with reduced mobility.
It has been created by Alexandre Trilla (atrilla), who is presently developing this project for the Ministry of Education of The Government of Catalonia (The Generalitat de Catalunya) supervised by Francesc AlÃas (falias) at Enginyeria i Arquitectura La Salle (Universitat Ramon Llull).
Be welcome to the magnus project’s weblog, where all the possible resources and documentation about magnus are available. This site is updated frequently in order to keep up with the project’s present development.
Ivan said
http://ssli.ee.washington.edu/vj/
Echale un vistazo.
atrilla said
Thank you very much indeed for your comment Ivan. I was unaware of this project!
As far as I am concerned, statistical analysis of speech (Hidden Markov Models) is more accurate than deterministic analysis (Patterns Recognition) when it comes to automatic speech recognition. That’s the main fact Sphinx-4, based on HMMs, was chosen to be the base of magnus instead of alternatives based on Patterns Recognition such as Vocal Joystick in this case.
It can be seen in the VJ Video Demonstrations that the various systems are mainly controlled with the voice’s pitch. The goal of magnus, on the other side, is to provide a means of mouse control via several voice keywords. It’s a different way of dealing with the problem. Not better nor worse, just different. As usual in engineering development, it all depends on the the final application.
Another interesting project based on Patterns Recognition applied to people with motor impairments and also carried out in the Ministry of Education can be found in Jordi Lagares’s Fressa Project.
juaxix said
Para cuando blogear con la voz gente?
alfem said
Do you thing your engine would be easily used in spanish ?
I’m really interested in it for Guadalinex !
atrilla said
That would be the utopic use of a Speech Recognizer. Unfortunately, when a large amount of words are to be recognized, its accuracy is “proportionally” worsened.
On the other side Magnus uses a limited vocabulary, which enables a better accuracy to be obtained since it can focus on details, say, different phonetic transcriptions for a single command. This task would be very difficult if thousands of words were contemplated with this system.
So I believe it’s difficult to say when the goal of your question, Juaxix, will be accomplished.
atrilla said
Oh yes indeed Alfem, I believe it can be very easily used in Spanish. I will bear in mind your wish to make the language migration a piece of cake.
In the end, the language configuration will be based on text files, so any user could personalize their Magnus so that it recognized any command they wanted. So if anyone needs to use Magnus in Spanish, for example, it will be just a matter of editing a few text files with some phonetic transcriptions, and the process will be over and ready to run smoothly. In the documentation that will be available near the end of (this first stage of) the project, say my Master Thesis, all the aspects of functionality and configuration will be thoroughly explained.
Let me thank you very much for your interest in Magnus. I invite you to keep in touch with it proposing interesting lines of development for Guadalinex. I hope that in a few day’s time, once I’m over with my exams, a first release of Magnus (0.1.0) will be available for testing, along with a list of improvements, your suggestion being among them, of course.
juaxix said
Hello, do you know about this blog? amis95.blogspot.com she want voice recognition because her hands does not work correctly with her age…
it would be hiralius for old people, dont you think?
atrilla said
Hello Juaxix! I had quickly visited her blog once, I remember it’s a famous one, but I didn’t realize of her problem with the tremble in her hands. It would be very nice to break the barriers to technology that people with motor impairments have. This kind of assistance is one of the goals that Magnus aims to reach. I absolutely agree with you.