tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20155610.post3626516221525098729..comments2024-03-06T02:46:19.929+00:00Comments on Translation Tribulations: Your language in Hey memoQ: recognition information for speechKevin Lossnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14727800526216764023noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20155610.post-61085278117423199362019-01-15T15:55:31.602+00:002019-01-15T15:55:31.602+00:00I'm glad that iOS is kind about "Hunglish...I'm glad that iOS is kind about "Hunglish"; I think it was István who always complained that DNS hated his dictation :-) Can't see why, really, as he has a nice accent.<br /><br />You're probably right about "just a bluetooth headset" as screaming with my bluetooth earbuds works reasonably well. The only real problem is that all my expensive microphone equipment is USB-based, because all my recording studio gurus have emphasized "better results" for audio recordings with such equipment for years, so that's where I spent my money, and I use the same stuff with DNS. But I have had my eye on a nice bit of bluetooth equipment that a Portuguese author I know got recently to dictate his new book with that Chrome app I blogged about recently. I'm told it works well for him, though I don't know if we share the same level of expectation.<br /><br />By "dictation style" I refer to the speed and number of words used. I see different results generally with iOS (any iOS dictation) at my office with nice fiber optic-based high bandwidth versus at the farm, where weather conditions can play Hell with my sometimes-4G, sometimes-3G-if-I'm-lucky connection. At least I've got the WASP male part going for me ;-)<br /><br />Don't beat yourself up too much about the command thing. I thought it would be a no-brainer to whip up a quick functional command set in German, and it took more time than I expected. I appreciate that the app made it out when it did after a long wait; we could at least test more, identify little issues like those capitalization bugs with the iOS caps commands and think about the implications of command use (and the need to switch the command language to filter on source text, stuff like that). I think when some key non-DNS language command sets like Russian or Romanian are out and these are easily exchangeable as light resources (instead of by playing games with the XML file like I do) things will be looking up a good bit. When/if that resource implement happens, maybe add an option to apply to all sub-languages. It was a pain dealing with the four variants of German I do separately, though this is really an academic/demo issue for me, because my working languages are the best-supported ones for DNS.Kevin Lossnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14727800526216764023noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20155610.post-13105161646123771822019-01-15T15:05:03.940+00:002019-01-15T15:05:03.940+00:00To necropost again,
(1) isn't this issue wit...To necropost again, <br /><br />(1) isn't this issue with microphones somewhat overblown? I'm convinced you (and Jim Wardell etc) are trying to help, but I'm afraid you are just making it look more difficult than it is. A simple bluetooth headset should work. Or a quiet room.<br />(2) We will be working on voice commands for other languages. It indeed might have been a mistake not to do this for the initial release. Probably not for all of them at the same time.<br />(3) I'm not sure I understand the problem of "dictation style". Honestly, there could be factors I do not see, but the iOS speech-to-text thing seems to understand my "Hunglish" accent extremely well. With general English text, I can speak extremely fast and there are hardly any mistakes. But, again, there might be factors I'm missing. Other accents might be less "efficient", and I even heard that speech-to-text might be biased towards men (meaning it is more likely to understand them better. No kidding, I heard it in a talk by a speech-to-text expert at a conference: the point was that the tech worked better for W.A.S.P. men, than for women or any minority, sadly.<br />(4) This is interesting, it might make sense for us to try and test with dodgy connections.<br />gergelyvhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14815726459294195145noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20155610.post-31894869286497139792019-01-10T12:26:31.810+00:002019-01-10T12:26:31.810+00:00I have spent several times what a used iPhone 5S o...I have spent several times what a used iPhone 5S or 6 would cost for various microphones I use with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, my Blue Yeti being one of the cheapest at about €130 on sale at the time. So yes, you are right about recouping costs quickly.<br /><br />But as I've mentioned a few times, the real barriers to effective use/testing right now are more:<br />(1) working out reliable microphone ergonomics,<br />(2) functional command sets for the dictation languages (only English was released by mQtech, and I published German commands on this blog, but these are really of interest only for source language command dictation, because those are languages covered by Dragon NS - Hey memoQ's potential is really for non-DNS languages as we know),<br />(3) practice/guidance for mobile "dictation style" (which differs, as I have found, from the requirements of desktop computer recognition apps), and <br />(4) really good bandwidth!! (testing on dodgy mobile data links where Google Translate fails half the time will not give you good dictation results no matter how great your mike and its positioning is!)<br /><br />Within the reasonably limited parameters of iOS devices coupled to memoQ running on Windows machines (on MacOS devices with Parallels, etc. you can use MacOS dictation with all its options), the critical task now is to figure out the best recommendations for successful and consistent sound pickup (microphone) in a way that leaves hands free to use a keyboard and to configure commands for handling the controls in the respective target language. As I learned in my work for that in German, this last one is not trivial at all and clearly will have to be handled by knowledgeable, patient users in most cases, not by mQtech. But... it will be much easier to share the configuration results when these are exchangeable as light resources and we don't have to hack that XML configuration file as I described in another blog post.<br /><br />This feature is at the proof of concept stage and basically looks good in that respect, but without the issues 1-4 being sorted out, it will of course look rather bad in many/most tests. But then, when I follow discussions such as those in the Facebook forum for Translators Who Use Dictation (as I think it's called), a lot of people have very bad initial experience with better tools like Dragon NaturallySpeaking because they don't understand the microphone issues or good speaking practices for dictation or they don't look at the command cheat sheet to deal with issues like capitalization. In the initial release of Hey memoQ, as you may recall, there are serious, documented problems with a number of the capitalization-related iOS commands, and for my work, this would be a major irritant in any case until it is fixed. For now I focus on other things, like figuring out good microphone configurations, because those are important, really, no matter what dictation solution I use.<br />Kevin Lossnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14727800526216764023noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20155610.post-70117269989419095672019-01-10T11:42:55.618+00:002019-01-10T11:42:55.618+00:00Basically we had two free speech-to-text options, ...Basically we had two free speech-to-text options, the one in iOS and the one in Android. (There might be paid ones that are better, but the cost makes them unrealistic. The translator would in the end spend as mush or more on "dictation bills" as on memoQ itself. Also, frankly, the providers of these services weren't interested in talking with us back in the day.) Developing for one platform at a time makes a lot of sense for a new product. For example, if we go into some wrong directions, or have some expensive bugs, we would need to spend on fixing two platforms if we had two. Also, a new product like this in not a guaranteed success. If we spend twice the amount on two platforms, and it turns out that it isn't a success, that is twice the loss.<br /><br />Also, as we said in our Hey memoQ FAQ, the speech recognition in iOS (iPhone + iPad) is more feature complete for our purposes. In Android, for many languages, if you say "comma" or "period" (in your language), it won't result in the punctuation sign in the text, but the words themselves. It would need some additional language specific work.<br /><br />Also, call me arrogant, but if you think that dictation could help your productivity, the minimal iOS device for Hey memoQ is an iPhone 5, which costs about 50 euros used. It might pay for itself the first day. I can assure you that an Android version of Hey memoQ would cost us somewhat more. :) Honestly, if we were hell bent on increasing adoption, buying a lot os used iPhone 5s and sending it out to memoQ users with Android phones that are interested in dictation would be a more cost efficient approach. :Pgergelyvhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14815726459294195145noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20155610.post-49717681924968394422019-01-08T17:32:02.879+00:002019-01-08T17:32:02.879+00:00I've been a paying active user of MemoQ since ...I've been a paying active user of MemoQ since 2010, and I don't have any Apple products. How ironic that MemoQ doesn't run natively on Macs, but insists on using an iPhone for their Hey MemoQ feature. Why no Android version? I feel left out.Zingarohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07538892735363565384noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20155610.post-47052062520682197122018-12-13T14:46:41.170+00:002018-12-13T14:46:41.170+00:00Ah, I see that what I wrote about the "Select...Ah, I see that what I wrote about the "Select [phrase]" thing is all messed up above, and totally incomprehensible at the moment, because the occurences of [phrase] all vanished.<br /><br />So the point was that when you edit the "Select [phrase]" voice command, you can only change the "select" part of it to some other word(s). It is intentional that you do not see [phrase], and you cannot put that part anywhere else but the end of the command.gergelyvhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14815726459294195145noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20155610.post-68008022893808440632018-12-12T12:37:21.832+00:002018-12-12T12:37:21.832+00:00Thanks, Gergely. I was afraid that maybe I was doi...Thanks, Gergely. I was afraid that maybe I was doing something wrong with that concordance command.<br /><br />I agree about the spaces. I tried to explain to Zsolt the other day that this is more than a dictation issue with insertions and (prepended spaces) ought to be an option for certain types of translation results hits. But still, the response to a dictated "spacebar" command needs fixing!Kevin Lossnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14727800526216764023noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20155610.post-52578958971665673002018-12-12T10:17:27.405+00:002018-12-12T10:17:27.405+00:00Hi Kevin,
"Press " commands are tricky,...Hi Kevin,<br /><br />"Press " commands are tricky, because you dictate in the target language of the project (most of the time at least). I don't think that "Enter", "Esc", "Tab", "Space", etc. would work fine. For example, Hungarians typically refer to these keys by their English names, typically with a good "Hunglish" accent. <br /><br />Select : all you need to know is that you only need to type your desired version of "Select". If we allowed the user to edit the thing, that would be an additional potential source of errors. The thingy is always place automatically by memoQ at the end. This also means that you currrently can't put any words after the . This were all design decisions, which are of course not always perfect. :)<br /><br />The Concordance window was honestly "let go" for the initial release. We had limited time and resources and focused on the functionality in the translation grid itself. I still feel that refining the core task of dictating the translation is way more important. Same with read-back, and adding doictation "everywhere else": I still think that we can bring some good improvements in the basics of just dictating translations, and that is more worth it. <br /><br />Spaces: if I understand this correctly, my feeling is that spaces should be placed by the insertion command in a right way in the first place, instead of helping the user work around it.<br /><br />BR,<br />Gergely<br /><br />gergelyvhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14815726459294195145noreply@blogger.com