Rob's Response Point

Sorry about the late comment to this story. I've been falling behind on my blog reading lately.

Late in your interview with Robert Scoble, he asked you about the possibility of using speech rocognition to produce transcripts of his interviews for example. Your answer was that the results he would get would not be very good unless the the speech engine was trained to each of the spearkers voices.

I've heard about ASR engines produced by companies like Autonomy/Virage that claim to be able to do a decent job of speaker independent and unconstrained domain voice recognition for similar uses like indexing and and searching newscasts etc. Do you have experience with or an opinion about how good those engines are?

Related to this is another question I've been wondering about: Suppose you pointed an engine at a video like the interview example above, but instead of using it to produce a transcript of the interview you were only interested in finding instances of a well defined list of keywords. This would be useful in indexing and searching libraries of audio content also. Would that be an easier problem to solve for speaker independent (i.e. untrained) speech recognition?

Thanks if you find this and have the time to respond.