Hi Everyone,
Ryan here. I don’t do many technical blog posts anymore now that I’m not involved in as much front line support as in the past but as you may know, we have started selling the SayIt product by nVoq and one of the many things that I personally like about it is the ability to really make it do what a user wants or needs it to do.
One of the ways SayIt does this is through its substitution ability. I know other Speech Recognition products have the ability to customize using scripting and such but one thing I think is Uber cool about SayIt is that they make much use of RegEx expressions. Without getting into too much detail about RegEx, it is an amazingly powerful (albeit can be quite complex) search tool that, in my humble opinion, really does warrant the ability for me to say that it provide a “Sky’s the limit” to SayIt as far as substitutions go.
When we onboard a new SayIt client, we have a certain vocabulary and substitution list that we load for the clients to save them time (ie: city names, facility names, common last names, certain locale spelling ie: centre, instead of center) but as we go through the initial training and follow-up period with the client, we can literally make whatever customizations to their recognition results that they want. Sure, it’s easy to make a substitution like changing Anemia to Anaemia, but what if you wanted to have any numeral value between 1-9 to automatically have the printed name version after ie: 1 (one), 5 (five). You can do this with RegEx expressions. (Maybe not the ideal real world example but just an example as to the power of RegEx and by association, SayIt substitutions).
Since this is such a useful and powerful tool, I am planning on posting some of the more interesting RegEx uses we put together for clients in the future. In the meantime, if you are using another Speech Recognition software and are stuck with some sort of substitution limitation or words aren’t being recognized right, I would love to hear from you and show you how we can solve this in SayIt.
Post by +Ryan Gaudet
