Possible ways for Arabic support

[tria]

Hello,

I've been using VC for the past two days, and I am liking what I am seeing so far (when speaking about English). I also intend to get a license anytime soon.
I know that VC doesn't support Arabic out of the box (and many other languages). But is there any why of using third party tools/engines to make it recognize the words and map them to the command in VC. I tried to write the Arabic command texts in English (Arabic pronunciation, English spelling). The problem with Arabic is that we have more phonetics that cannot be said in any other language, and cannot be spelled in English letters. Maybe one of the close languages that can pronounce most of our phonetics is the German language. But I tried to play with it also without any luck.

So if there someone who have came up with a way, or know of a third party product that can be used with VC, then I will be happy to know about. I don't mind using English, but other people in my house will (which is the reason for using VC).

Thank you.

[jitterjames]

Hi Tria,

Welcome to the VC forums.

I don't believe such a thing is possible. Until such time as the Microsoft speech recognition engine that comes with Windows supports more languages, we need to work with what is provided in the engine.  Any "third party tool" would need to use a completely different engine, so at that point you would not really be using Voxcommando anymore.

Currently we must choose one of the following languages as a starting point and then use that language or try to manipulate the available spellings to get what we want:

- English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese

I have not experimented at all with Japanese or Chinese so I have no idea if, or how well, these languages work in VoxCommando.

[xtermin8r]

Hi Tria

james is correct when he wrote

"we must choose one of the following languages as a starting point and then use that language or try to manipulate the available spellings to get what we want:
- English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese"

i chose english

here are a few of my examples

[tria]

Thanks guys for the suggestions. I was playing with VC yesterday and if you do some hacking with spelling the words (I don't spell them as they are pronunced) you will be able to make VC recognize them as if it were one of the supported languages. However, the key for success is to lower the accuracy (I set it at 60%-65%). For me, most English phrases get recognized with 90%+ accuracy, so lowering it to 60% will only help with detecting the hacked Arabic, and not affect English. Also, the longer the phrase, or if it contains English words, the better it get recognized. Short commands with hard phonetics are nearly impossible to be recognized (and therefore not worth setting up). When I started this I knew there isn't any other way unless the system support it, but I was looking for some hacks. Like using third party that recognize Arabic and map/send it to English input to VC (or something along the line).

halx, I see I have one Arabic friend here, and guessing from your snapshot that you are probably from Egypt
mind to ask what do you use VC for. I am using it mainly with XBMC in the living room.

I might share XML files when I finish mapping the commands to Arabic
Thanks guys.

[xtermin8r]

hi tia

i am learning arabic and i live in England.i use vox for many things, mainly for my home automation controller  and xbmc..

[tria]

Oh I see. Then from what I saw you are not bad at it. I met some people while there who are like you (some of them were good at at, some of them were just okay). What are the chances of you being one of them haha. Arabic is not an easy language mainly due to many factors, but you probably already know that.

I am working on a home automation plugin for xbmc, where you can have house plan, and can toggle switches/devices on and off in a visual manner. I intend to release it once I finish it.