From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (qmail-queue invoked by uid 0); 4 Sep 1996 16:56:47 -0000 MBOX-Line: From zocki@goldfish.cube.net Wed Sep 4 18:54:39 1996 Received: (qmail-queue invoked by uid 504); 4 Sep 1996 16:54:19 -0000 Received: (qmail-queue invoked from smtpd); 4 Sep 1996 16:54:16 -0000 Received: from softdnserror (HELO localhost) (127.0.0.1) by softdnserror with SMTP; 4 Sep 1996 16:54:16 -0000 Date: Wed, 4 Sep 1996 18:54:15 +0200 (MET DST) From: Hans Zoebelein To: blinux-list@goldfish.cube.net Subject: HTK speech recognition toolkit for Linux Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII List-Id: Dear blinux subscriber, here comes an announcment about a commercial speech recognition toolkit which will be released this year. Best Regards Hans ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Sometime in 1996, Entropic is expected to release a Linux version of HTK, the Hidden Markov Model Tool Kit. HTK is a commercial software package for building speech recognition applications, which may be especially useful to the blind community. HTK is the most powerful and flexible speech recognition system development toolset available, and it is capable of building speaker independent, large vocabulary, continuous speech recognition systems with state of the art accuracy. Systems developed using an R and D enhanced version of HTK have far outscored the best efforts of all other entrants in the U. S. government sponsored ARPA Benchmark tests of accuracy for the most difficult speech recognition tasks. Entrants in these tests include most of the major cutting-edge laboratories in the world which are working on these technologies. A number of applications could be developed for the blind community, including desktop oriented, shell oriented, and/or application oriented command and control systems, and even continuous dictation systems. These capabilities are not available, to my knowledge, in any other way. HTK has high up-front costs (which may vary per country) which can typically be born only by corporate or government sponsors of research and development; academic and multi-license discounts are available. Redistribution costs for products and applications developed using HTK, however, can be low, if the number of end-users is large. HTK is not freely available, unlike much other Linux software. It is a commercial software package, and Entropic prices do not vary with operating system, so that we don't compete against ourselves. While some may consider that commercial software for Linux violates the Linux philosophy, our reasons for doing a Linux version of this important Entropic product are because a) we have a number of customers who wish to lower the overall cost of using HTK by using Intel-based computing hardware, and b) we consider Linux to be a respectable, commercial-grade flavor of Unix. The Linux community will, we hope, take it as a compliment that commercial packages of great significance in the scientific, R&D and commercial application development world are being ported and made available on their platform. In Entropic's case it shows that we have the utmost respect for their work. If you are interested in further information about HTK, please take a look at our web pages at http://www.entropic.com, if that is possible, or otherwise please ask me to send you an ASCII file with full details. Tom