Re: smart file cabinet mockup

[Seth Teller <teller@lcs.mit.edu>]

this is a great idea -- i'd like to be a volunteer.
jim, i have a sony digital voice recorder, if i do
some utterances onto that can i give you guys the
file?  otherwise i'm happy to use the ipaq if you
lend me one.

btw, i've created a mailing list for this group, 
called

	sfc@graphics.lcs.mit.edu

with jim, david, joe, and me as members.  please use
it if you remember ... it makes email indexing 
possible pre-haystack.

seth.

Jim Glass wrote:
> 
> David, Seth,
> 
> In creating any new speech-based application I always worry
> about language usage.  The technology always works better
> when you have lots of data that reflects how people will
> talk to the eventual system.  The challenge is always to get
> the initial data to get the first iteration working.  I have
> an idea I want to bounce off of you for the smart file
> cabinet.
> 
> we have been using the iPAQ to collect data for our speaker
> ID/face ID experiments.  I think we could probably use this
> framework to collect speech data for the smart file cabinet
> too.  I would propose that we send people home with the iPAQ
> so they can go through their piles of paper junk and record
> what they might say about each piece.  They can also do this
> in their office.  We will set up a script to have people
> transcribe what they said when they download it back to our
> file server.  Once we have a sizeable corpus we can train up
> an initial system to talk to.  There will still be many
> challenges (i.e., out-of-vocabulary words), but the basic
> recognizer should be somewhat competent.
> 
> I'll volunteer to get everyone in our group (around 30
> people) to do this.  We have multiple iPAQs setup, so we
> think we can collect a lot of data in January if we push.
> 
> sound reasonable?
> 
> jim
> 
> p.s.  we could also take pictures of stuff while we're doing
> this, but that would probably make the data collection more
> tedious, and I'm not sure it adds anything.