Easier Said Than Done

By Andy Patrizio

April 14, 2003

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Ever watch any of the Star Trek shows and wish your computer could operate on voice command like that? Speech recognition is one of those technologies that's been under development for years, and for its advances, well, it still stinks.

Most of the problem is in the software, no question. A lot of very smart people have worked very hard on this and it's still not perfect: not even close. Plus, most of these systems require you to wear a headset, since the microphones were so poor that they had to all but stick the mic in your mouth to pick up anything. It reflects the low quality of the microphones. Not to mention it's annoying to wear those things.

SoundMAX and Andrea Electronics have teamed up to alleviate some of this mess. SoundMAX, an Analog Devices company, makes audio chips for PC motherboard. Its CODECs offer Dolby Digital 5.1 sound quality, providing far better sound output than your standard AC97 audio chip. Andrea makes microphones and software to optimize speech recognition and voice command software.

Now, the SoundMAX chips offer beautiful, digital sound. As most hardcore gamers know, if your motherboard comes with on-board audio, the first thing you do is throw in a Sound Blaster and disable the onboard audio in the BIOS, because that AC97 audio is terrible. SoundMAX Cadenza is every bit as rich in sound as the Sound Blaster Audigy, but what I really wanted to test out was the speech recognition.

Together, these two products make a very good team for speech input and command of a computer. I was sent a PC with the SoundMAX chip on the motherboard and an Andrea Superbeam Array microphone to try out, after seeing it demonstrated at the previous Intel Developer Forum.

I was impressed with its clarity at voice command recognition, and the fact that you didn't need to wear a headset. The unit actually has two microphones built in, as the picture on the above link shows, and sits on top of your monitor.

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