Monday, May 19, 2008

Curious microphone behavior

Over the past week I have witnessed several occurrences of some strange microphone behavior. The recognition window suggests that it hears the following, "him him him him him him him him him". While I regularly use the playback on the correction to hear what has actually been said when I correct errors, I have not been able to catch this on audio to hear what is actually going on. It is inconsistent.

I've also recently noticed that the microphone is capturing a lot of breathing. I believe this indicates that I need to adjust my microphone position, particularly my boom. I actually have a mirror on my desktop facing me so I can monitor or microphone position, and while it looks like my microphone is in the right place I still pick up the breathing sounds. I don't know if the breathing sounds are related to the "him" occurrence.

I'm fairly convinced that the current user file I have is corrupt, but I've been using it for less than two weeks. I think it may be time to resort to my saved pristine user, or scratch the pristine user and retrain a new user.

2 comments:

reddot said...

Hi Molly,

If you put your microphone on your desk and stand away from your desk for a bit, do you still get the phantom recognition of him?

What do you think may have corrupted your user file? People seem to talk a lot about corrupt user files and creating a pristine one and all night and stuff, but what is that actually mean? How can one tell it to your user file is that?

I find that I need to move my microphone off to the side more than typically is recommended. Also the booms on the microphone seem way too long like the manufacturer wants the mic element to be directly in front of your mouth, but for the best speech rec performance that needs to be off the corner of your mouth.

Todd

Nina Davies said...

Hi Molly,

Thank you for leaving a comment at my blog. I shall watch your problems with interest ........