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Comment by walden42 | Hacker News Reader

Are there open-source voice recognition projects in the works that could replace the likes of Google Now and the others? If not, there should be.

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This is what I started thinking about as I was reading the paranoid HN comments. I believe there's open source voice recognition but the challenging part is taking commands and making them actionable.

Defining commands and their corresponding actions is something I think an open source could actually do much more effectively than companies. When everyone in the world can contribute commands rather than a single team of software devs it is possible build up a much larger collection of them. I would really like the ability to add commands to a natural language command system when a command I use doesn't work. Also, I think that a reprogramable command system would open up an interesting programming paradigm where one could define new commands and actions in terms of other commands in the system. For example,

What's new?

> Unrecognized command

When I say "What's new" read the "In the news..." section of Wikipedia's main page.

> Acknowledged.

That's a great idea. If this was used by a large group of people one could take the total commands used for a specific action that were programmed and make the n% most popular ones the new standard going forward.

Also, if there existed something like a phrase thesaurus that could be extremely useful for building out a list of commands. For instance, "What's the weather?" and "What's it like outside?" mean the same thing and if you searched for one in the phrase thesaurus a synonym for the other would pop up. Then all the computer would have to do is take the input phrase, search the thesaurus, and find a synonym that it recognizes.

AFAIK we don't even have good voice synthesizers. We're way back on this stuff.

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