While this blog is defenitely not updated nearly enough, things have still progressed at an amazing pace. The software is maturing quickly and altough the windows version still crashes from time to time, those crashes seem to be completely random and mostly happen when opening menus and such so I get to blame KDE or Qt for that ;). Anything else seems alright and works really well in practical tests.
Speaking of practical tests: The current prototype has been tested with two teenagers suffering spastic paralysis. One of them had only a mild speech impairment and after just one hour of training reached already a recognition rate of astonishing 97 % percent on a lexicon with 26 words. Those 26 words are enough to control MediaPortal, Firefox, Skype as well as sending pre-defined Text snippets as e-Mails.
The other test person had a severe speech impairment which meant that even as a native speaker I couldn't understand him at first myself. However, with just a few trainings sessions we already reached impressive 73 % recognition rate on the same 26 words.
This proves that simon really is usable for people who could never use commercial offerings because of their speech impairment.
Tomorrow we have an important presentation to doctors and therapists to demonstrate simons usefulness for handicapped people and it's opportunities when used as a therapeutic tool.
Wish us luck!
