Listen to Me
The Blather, FreeSpeech, Palaver, Simon, and Vedics speech recognition programs are ready to respond to voice commands. This sounds good in theory, but there are some pitfalls in practice.
Controlling a computer with speech
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A strong "Start browser!" belted into the microphone will start Firefox – at least, that's what the five leading free speech recognition programs (Blather, FreeSpeech, Palaver, Simon, and Vedics) promise. With that, they want to make input easier and also help disabled individuals better operate the desktop.
Four of these vendors – Vedics being the exception – allow you to decide for yourself what command triggers an action. A "Start browser!" could conceivably be used to open a text editor – confusing, yet possible.
The five applications do not analyze speech patterns themselves; they leave that task to other software. As a rule PocketSphinx [1] from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is the "other" software used.
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