🚀 go-pugleaf

For what it's worth, here's my view of Simon Says.

First, I must say that the support from HSD and Greg is great. Plenty of
help in tracking down problems.

Second, even in a noisy environment, it works. Sort of.

How noisy is my environment? MonsterScope shows that the default mike
picks up about 1mv of background noise, while my speach climbs up to the
3-4 mv range.

The problem? This Signal/noise ratio of 3 is too low for simon to work
reliably. I have to raise my voice to get Simon to work, and for some
reason that I don't understand, longer phrases are not always better than
short phrases -- perhaps Simon is more sensitive to some sounds than to
other sounds.

In any event, I had to return it; I was getting a sore throat, and it
was only about 70% accurate. On the other hand, I was trying to do
a lot with it. I had set up a sublevel in the common dictionary named
"dictation", and way trying to teach it some common words.

"Me" vs "He" vs "She" vs "We" "The" took about 40 minutes to train.

What about regular things? Normal use of things like menu items works
fine -- I get about 85-90% accuracy there. But for some reasons, things
like "Cut_Selection" or "Console" just get ignored more often than not.
And "Miniaturize" is also poor. These are around 30-50% accurate.
Sometimes Simon doesn't even beep to indicate that it heard something
it didn't understand -- it just missed them completely.

As a dictator, Simon gets overthrown. As a macro, I found keys to be
easier to type. My goal was to be able to control my computer from
anywhere in the room; this doesn't work well with the built in Mike.

I did try an external mike (a cheap radio shack one). It did reduce the
noise level, but it also reduced my voice level -- the ratio stayed at
3:1.

My comments? Try it. Get the demo version, play with it. If your drive
fans are not noisy, you may love it.

		Michael
-- 
		Michael Gersten		michael@stb.info.com
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