OSSRI's mission is to provide speech recognition capability on Linux, primarily to benefit the disabled community. The statement below is taken from our founding document:
The Open-Source Speech Recognition Initiative (OSSRI) was formed to advocate for the needs of all people who would benefit from speech recognition software in order to function productively in today's society.
OSSRI's founding members met and formed their business plan over the Internet, and represent a cross-section of the English-speaking world. Three are from Massachusetts: one each is from Arkansas, Washington, California, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand. Additional members have been and will be solicited among existing speech recognition research groups in, not only the English-speaking world, but in Japan, Germany, France and other countries with vibrant speech-recognition research communities.
Our group was formed to address the one specific need of the physically disabled, including those with repetitive-motion injuries and auto-immune disorders such as arthritis, bursitis, and other joint and tissue diseases, and those with dyslexia and other problems with hand-eye coordination.
This need is to be able to do computer work independent of the keyboard, through continuous speech recognition programming with command-and-control functionality.
In today's society, nearly every job requires some form of computer work, with keyboard and/or mouse input. However, many people either cannot perform keyboard/mouse input at all, can perform it only with discomfort, or can perform it only for limited periods of time. Such people would benefit greatly and become much more productive with the use of speech-recognition technology.
We also recognize the needs of the hearing-impaired, whose lives would improve if speech could be put into text simultaneously with it being spoken.
But speech-recognition technology is in its infancy. And anything useable is closed-source. It is not only expensive, but subject to the cost/benefit analysis of the corporation that must see a profit to continue to develop and market it. Continuous speech recognition, the most valuable and useful type of speech-recognition, is rarer still, and today is available through only one corporation.
Another problem is that speech-recognition technology has mostly been ignored by the Open Source community, especially the Linux community. But Open Source technology will become more and more widespread in the coming years, as state and local governments and businesses convert to Open Source in order to save money and have more control over program development. Many governments in Western Europe, and the middle and Far East have already converted to Open Source. In the United States there are initiatives afoot in Massachusetts and elsewhere to convert governments and schools to Open Source.
We endorse the goals of the Open Source movement; however, those with disabilities must not be left behind by its implementation. There must be technology available for their needs, and it must be either free or reasonably priced. And development efforts must begin now, when it is needed but still not financially viable.