Pursuits
Can Speech-Recognition Software Work in Mandarin?
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In anticipation of Apple’s introduction of Siri in Chinese this year, I decided to try Dragon, a line of smartphone voice apps by Nuance Communications—the company behind the speech-recognition technology that powers Siri. It comes in a number of languages, including Mandarin Chinese.
On a basic level, Dragon in Chinese can be pretty amazing, although like most speech recognition software, it is not 100 percent accurate. First, though, a note about why Chinese is particularly challenging for speech recognition. There are only 400 monosyllabic sounds in Mandarin, which are differentiated by tone. What’s that mean?