The audio equivalent of Riya?
Thinking about the Riya photo face recognizer got me back to thinking about the speech recognition problem. I am willing, although I am also a little bit nuts, to train the Riya web site to recognize the faces in my pictures in the hope of the benefit that I’ll be able to automate filing the pictures into who is in each one which would be a big problem if I actually did it. So with speech recognition I would also be willing to train a web site to understand what I say for similar benefits. The two in particular that I was thinking of is for podcasting and for translation while talking to someone in a foreign country through a Skype or similar VoIP product. So if a site were to be able to be trained to a voice and then be able to take inbound audio streams/files two potential markets would be the podcast to text (so that the casts could be searched better than what is out there today) and the text to translation. The web site would be able to consolidate voice prints and then be useful in other contexts were they to arise later – dictation, research notes, future commerce tools tying my phone # to the translation service so that those bots at American Airlines could better understand me, etc. Unfortunately it will take a lot of energy to build such a system including a good API, probably a better one than the one that Microsoft offers, a smart team of engineers, and a good team to market and sell the solution even when the technology doesn't work. Maybe if I wait three years all the pieces will come together and it will be worth doing then.