revisiting speech recognition in a Windows guest on KVM

revisiting speech recognition in a Windows guest on KVM

[Eric S. Johansson]

Apologies for taking so long to revisit this topic but well, new 
hardware, new software, new microphone and, you know, life…

Summary:
I have unable to forward my USB microphone connection to a Windows guest 
and I could use a little bit of assistance pointing me in the right 
direction.

Long story:
On my new laptop, speech recognition is working well on the Windows 
guest. I don't remember what client I was working with but I'm now using 
vmm-view in spice mode. I wasn't able to get the spice connection to 
make the USB microphone interface visible in Windows but I was able to 
get the built-in host to guest USB binding as supplied by the vmm manger.

It's almost exactly right. What I'm noticing is that the audio stream is 
not as clean as it could be. About every 15 to 20 seconds I hear a very 
quiet but distinct "thump". The reason this is a bad thing is because 
the recognition engine thinks it's the start of an utterance, spins its 
wheels for about 10+ seconds trying to decode what it hears. When 
NaturallySpeaking is spinning its wheels, it kills off all input because 
it is trying to avoid a race condition between other inputs and itself.

I'm not sure where the thump is coming from. I don't hear it on my other 
laptop and it's not external noise because it's extremely regular.

I'm wondering if the same problem would occur over the spice USB 
forwarding. I could use a bit of assistance figuring out what I'm doing 
wrong with spice USB forwarding so I can test out importing audio that way.

Thanks
--- eric