[Solved] Dictation commands not working
Thread poster: Nico Wagner
Nico Wagner
Nico Wagner  Identity Verified
Portugal
Local time: 16:03
English to German
Mar 5, 2019

Hello everyone,

I am testing the speech recognition in memoQ using my iPad and somehow can't get the dictation commands to work for German.

I have configured "Befehl bestätigen" as a command in German to confirm the current segment.

When I dictate "Befehl bestätigen" into the app, the text is inserted into the current segment, but the command is not executed.

Am I missing something obvious? I am working in a translation project from English t
... See more
Hello everyone,

I am testing the speech recognition in memoQ using my iPad and somehow can't get the dictation commands to work for German.

I have configured "Befehl bestätigen" as a command in German to confirm the current segment.

When I dictate "Befehl bestätigen" into the app, the text is inserted into the current segment, but the command is not executed.

Am I missing something obvious? I am working in a translation project from English to German.

Any ideas are greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
Nico
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James McVay
James McVay  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 12:03
Russian to English
+ ...
Need more information Mar 6, 2019

First of all, I have to confess that I wasn't aware memoQ had an app for the iPad called Hey memoQ. Thank you for that.

After a quick read of the “Help” for Hey memoQ, I'll venture a guess that you edited the verbal command for confirming a segment to change it from English to German. If that is what you did, then perhaps the app simply doesn't recognize German for commands, even though it recognizes German for dictation.

Is that what you did? If so, you may simply
... See more
First of all, I have to confess that I wasn't aware memoQ had an app for the iPad called Hey memoQ. Thank you for that.

After a quick read of the “Help” for Hey memoQ, I'll venture a guess that you edited the verbal command for confirming a segment to change it from English to German. If that is what you did, then perhaps the app simply doesn't recognize German for commands, even though it recognizes German for dictation.

Is that what you did? If so, you may simply need to stick with English for the commands. I wrote a macro to confirm segments in Dragon Professional Individual 15.3 for the PC that I named simply “Go.” Even though Dragon sometimes has problems with short words dictated without any surrounding context, it works just fine.

I'd be curious to know how well Hey memoQ works for you. I've tried dictating things on my iPad using both Siri and Google with mixed results.

[Edited at 2019-03-06 14:43 GMT]
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Nico Wagner
Nico Wagner  Identity Verified
Portugal
Local time: 16:03
English to German
TOPIC STARTER
... Mar 6, 2019

Hi James,

thanks for your reply.

I have also tried giving the commands in English, which only lead to the software trying to recognise German words in what I said. "Command confirm" comes out as "Komm man kann fahren" or something alike....

The proper speech recognition uses an Apple API and looked okay so far, although I never found the patience to play around with Dragon so I can't really compare.

Cheers,
Nico


 
Nico Wagner
Nico Wagner  Identity Verified
Portugal
Local time: 16:03
English to German
TOPIC STARTER
Solution Mar 6, 2019

Hi James,

it turns out that you were actually semi-right.

I had configured the command for German and was working in a project with the target language German (Germany). Configuring the command for the language sub-variant made it available in this project.

Cheers,
Nico


 
James McVay
James McVay  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 12:03
Russian to English
+ ...
Have you seen this YouTube video? Mar 6, 2019

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HCyMpxCgow.

The translator dictates commands in both German and English. However, he remarks: “Note that commands executed if the source text side is selected have to be in the source language in the first release!”


 
Nico Wagner
Nico Wagner  Identity Verified
Portugal
Local time: 16:03
English to German
TOPIC STARTER
... Mar 6, 2019

Thanks for the video, I hadn't seen it yet.

In the meantime I played around a bit more with the speech recognition and came to the conclusion that it won't save me enough time to be worth it, especially for the technical translations that I work on, since there will always be too much post editing work involved.

The only way I see this ever being viable for my work is if I can't make full use of my hands for some reason...


 
James McVay
James McVay  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 12:03
Russian to English
+ ...
You're probably right Mar 7, 2019

I have an older version of memoQ, so Hey memoQ isn't an option for me. When I first looked at it in the app store, it appeared that Hey memoQ could be used to work on an iPad away from a PC. However, it looks as though the translator has to sit in front of the PC with eyes on the screen and memoQ open on the PC.

I already use Dragon Professional Individual 15.3 with a SpeechWare 3-in-1 microphone, so using an iPhone or an iPad with their inferior built-in microphones while sitting i
... See more
I have an older version of memoQ, so Hey memoQ isn't an option for me. When I first looked at it in the app store, it appeared that Hey memoQ could be used to work on an iPad away from a PC. However, it looks as though the translator has to sit in front of the PC with eyes on the screen and memoQ open on the PC.

I already use Dragon Professional Individual 15.3 with a SpeechWare 3-in-1 microphone, so using an iPhone or an iPad with their inferior built-in microphones while sitting in front of my PC would actually result in more recognition errors. It wouldn't be worth it for me.

I will concede, however, that Hey memoQ might benefit translators working into languages that Dragon doesn't support. For example, one of the YouTube videos about Hey memoQ shows someone at a tradeshow dictating Japanese with characters appearing on the screen almost immediately. Unless I'm mistaken, Dragon doesn't support Japanese, and typing Chinese characters is so laborious that any kind of speech recognition support should boost productivity. I understand speech recognition has become popular with the general public in China for just that reason.

Also, it should be possible to use a better microphone with either the iPhone or iPad. That should result in fewer recognition errors.
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Nico Wagner
Nico Wagner  Identity Verified
Portugal
Local time: 16:03
English to German
TOPIC STARTER
... Mar 8, 2019

Hi James,

my issue aren't actual words that can't be recognized, but other, very specific words like company, product, class or method names, code fragments, words in CamelCase and other things that are frequent in the translations I work on and that I have to type/fix by hand.

Unfortunately there are so many of these words that I won't even start to teach them to any speech recognition tool.

If I ever break an arm I might look back into this, but until the
... See more
Hi James,

my issue aren't actual words that can't be recognized, but other, very specific words like company, product, class or method names, code fragments, words in CamelCase and other things that are frequent in the translations I work on and that I have to type/fix by hand.

Unfortunately there are so many of these words that I won't even start to teach them to any speech recognition tool.

If I ever break an arm I might look back into this, but until then.....
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[Solved] Dictation commands not working






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