Mobile phones are notorious for delivering voice messages that are broken up and practically indecipherable. This problem disappears for those who's phones are equipped with I Spleech Your Mind or the shortened name of Spleech.

Here's how it works:

Just as predictive text completes the typed word, according to a "likelihood" algorithm, so Spleech analyses then "live fills" the speech gaps in a call that is being broken up by bad signal reception.

It does this by calling on a database of likely completions, middles or prefixes to spoken words. It can even invent whole words to complete phrases.

This means that turning it on must by necessity result in a slight lag, as it analysis each word/phrase in context.

For example "I'm on the la... train" will have enough fragmented sound and intonation hints in it to be made into: "I'm on the late train"

Spleech is not guaranteed to be perfect, but it has a capacity to learn and become familiar with the most likely meanings and outcomes of calls from friends, just as we try to, only without the annoying gaps, and clipped off bits of words.
-- xenzag, May 21 2012

http://www.newscien...ction-software.html [hippo, May 21 2012]

http://www.language...-around-the-corner/ [hippo, May 21 2012]

Brilliant idea! I think the speech-to-text programmes like Dragon Naturally Speaking use a fair amount of this sort of logic to fill in gaps where they haven't understood something, so the know-how to acheive this probably exists already. Also, don't worry about the lag - this should be small enough not to be noticeable (e.g. a few hundreths of a second).
-- hippo, May 21 2012


I'd have thought you'd need more than a few hundredths of a second of context after the gap to make this work well - but even half a second of lag is probably OK if it makes the speech quality better.

It should definitely be possible to turn this off. For important calls you might not want to risk the Spleech feature making a mistake.

[+]
-- Wrongfellow, May 21 2012


I hope you're suggesting this for the humor factor. Then we can have web pages dedicated to mangled voice mails to go with the web sites showing all the humourous "corrections" made to text messages. Somehow it seems to me that the human brain is a much better tool for unmangling messages than a computer.

The one useful thing that a computer might be able to do is remove (or reduce) any loud clicks or digital artifacts that can temporarily desensitize the ear to the sounds that follow.
-- scad mientist, May 22 2012



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