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Problem with speech recognition

P

Porphyro

macrumors newbie
Original poster
I'm using Tiger on an iMac G5 with iSight.

I have tried using Speech Recognition to cut down on the amount of mousing and keyboarding I do. I have it set to listen for the keyword (computer) and then the command. So the mic is listening all the time for that keyword. The little arrows blink on each side of the mic picture when the mic hears something.

Well, after a while (no more than an hour so far, although sometimes far less), the little arrows continuously blink. The bars under the mic indicating input level show the usual one blue bar. So it looks like the speech recognition server is working hard trying to understand input that isn't coming in.

When I try to shut down the speech recognition, it freezes up. I have to force the speech processes to quit.

Any ideas about what's going on here? I want to use Speech, but the mic and software seem to be stuck on processing stuff that isn't there.
 
Maybe head to your Preferences folder and drag com.apple.speech.recognition.recognizer.prefs.plist,
com.apple.speech.recognition.feedback.prefs.plist and com.apple.speech.recognition.AppleSpeechRecognition.prefs.plist to the Desktop before restarting. Do this when Speech Recognition is closed. It will lose all your customised settings for Speech Recognition but if it doesn't help, you can put these files back where you found them to retain your settings. 🙂
 
I tried that today - thanks for the suggestion - but it's still freezing up. My only temporary fix is requiring a key to be pressed before it will accept commands. That sort of defeats the purpose of speech recognition, but it will do for now.

Any other ideas? I can't find much of anything in the way of Apple documentation on this problem.
 
Porphyro said:
Any other ideas? I can't find much of anything in the way of Apple documentation on this problem.
Click to expand...

Is there a lot of background noise that the Mac could be interpreting as a (very long) spoken command? Is there a TV on, or someone on the phone?

I had a funny case a couple of years ago when my Mac started talking back to the TV. (e.g. TV: "...we don't have time!" Mac: "It's seven thirty!")
 
This is just part of the buggy speech recognition. The exact same symptoms happen on my Mac, and I've lost count of the number of people I've seen report the same thing. The other common bug is that it simply turns itself off. It doesn't crash, it doesn't blink the arrows at you for an hour, it just switches the preference pane to "Off" and closes.

I tried to use it but gave up in frustration by the third day when both of these bugs kept happening to me (in a very quiet environment). It's the only part of OS X I've encountered that is as craptastic as some of the Windows software I have to use.
 
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