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Do you have a Bluetooth SR sleeper mic?
Submitted by dteasp on Wed, 02/07/2007 - 14:39.
I have already posted the main points below on another SR forum, but I think they may be of interest here as well. The purpose of this cross-posting is to broaden the discussion of Bluetooth mics that may be of interest to users of SR software users. I made the following discovery after purchasing a new cell phone with Bluetooth capability and a Bluetooth mic for hands-free driving. My cell phone model was Samsung SGH-E380 and the Bluetooth mic came in a box marked "Samsung Bluetooth Headset WEP 170". The text on the box states: "Talk time up to 8 hours". Bluetooth mics as input devices for DNS 9.0 have become a popular discussion topic since this software provides a Bluetooth voice profile. It immediately occurred to me that such a device would be ideal for use with my laptop, so I decided to try the Samsung device with my Acer TravelMate laptop, which has Bluetooth capability built in, and create a Bluetooth user profile in DNS Pro 9.0. There was no difficulty pairing the mic with the laptop, and I used the Samsung mic with that profile to dictate the original version of this message. The accuracy was stunning even though I trained the profile with only one piece (the Kennedy speech). I should also note that this mic has proven to be extremely noise canceling for telephone conversations; for example I can walk along the street in howling wind and have no trouble carrying on a telephone conversation. This capability may not be transferable to SR. I simply do not know, having no facilities to test the mic professionally or, for that matter, any experience in such testing. Nevertheless, the results were so surprising and positive that I thought it was worth sharing. I guess part of my reason for posting this is to encourage experimentation. If you have a Bluetooth mic of high quality for your cell phone, maybe you can get double "mileage" out of it. 
dteasp wrote: Bluetooth mic
Bluetooth mic came in a box marked Samsung Bluetooth Headset WEP 170
Several websites like the following indicate the microphone is discontinued.
Samsung Bluetooth Headset WEP-170
We have tested almost a dozen of these Bluetooth microphones with no boom or a short boom with Dragon NaturallySpeaking in typical moderate noise office environments. While they work fine with a telephone, their accuracy was quite poor for speech recognition software like Dragon NaturallySpeaking.
--
Martin Markoe, eMicrophones, Inc.
The best microphones for Speech Recognition
Read, "Key Steps to High Speech Recognition Accuracy"
Hi Martin, The link you
Hi Martin,
The link you included:
Several websites like the following indicate the microphone is discontinued.
Samsung Bluetooth Headset WEP-170.
leads you to a web page that does say the WEP-170 is discontinued and offers, among others, a link to WEP-180. Nevertheless, if you click this link, you go to text with a heading for WEP-180, but the entire description is about WEP-170. I don't think the webmaster there is on the ball, nor is it possible to tell which part of the web page is wrong.
Well, the main point in my original posting is the same: if you own a good Bluetooth mic for your cell phone, try it with a DNS 9.0 Bluetooth user. It may be a very good to excellent DNS mic.
I did this experiment expecting very poor results, mostly because of the findings you mentioned from your company's rigorous testing of similar mics. You know from past conversations with me that I am not an easy consumer when it comes to SR mics, so I plan on turning on a radio or playing a hard rock CD while I'm dictating at home tonight, as an informal test of the mic's noise-canceling ability. I'll report back on what I discover.
Regards,
Daniel
Here are the results of the
Here are the results of the noise-cancellation testing that I did this evening, as I mentioned in my reply to Martin:
The testing was done in my home, in a corner room on the second floor, where it is usually pretty quiet, and this was the case this evening. I used my laptop for the test, an Acer TravelMate 4670, which comes equipped with Bluetooth capability and has previously proven to be very DNS 9.0 Pro friendly. It is also the computer I used for my original "testing" as described in the initial post in this thread.
The test proceeded in three stages: 1. Reading a selected passage in "quiet". 2. Reading the same passage with popular music (Paul Simon's album Graceland) playing at low-volume (I know this is subjective. I did not have any instruments to make decibel readings. The test was whether I could hear the music if I wanted to and shut it out if I needed to.) 3. Reading the passage with the same music playing at a slightly higher volume (again, subjective; the test was whether I found it difficult to shut it out if I wanted to do so. Note that no one would consider this music to be blasting.)
Here are the results: the passage read consisted of 140 words, and for the first two tests, the accuracy was 98.5% (138/140). The third test could not be carried out because the background music resulted in too many words being added to even conduct a test. Given these results, I very much doubt that this mic would be viable in a normal office environment. However, for me dictating using my laptop mostly at home, this mic is a gem.
There you have it.
Daniel