That's unlikely. How do Chinese people write a sentence on the computer? Old systems would have you write the letters, eg.: "shi", then display a long list of all the possible characters with that sound (for all 4 tones). Newer systems use context to figure out the right characters for the whole sentence at once (probably using naive Bayes --- see Peter Norvig's spell checker), so that I can just type "Wo shi Jianada ren" and the output would be the correct 6 Chinese characters. I never need to specify the tones.
So I would assume that voice recognition could do even better by analyzing tonal information.
Comments
...and how hard it would be for voice recognition systems too.
That's unlikely. How do Chinese people write a sentence on the computer? Old systems would have you write the letters, eg.: "shi", then display a long list of all the possible characters with that sound (for all 4 tones). Newer systems use context to figure out the right characters for the whole sentence at once (probably using naive Bayes --- see Peter Norvig's spell checker), so that I can just type "Wo shi Jianada ren" and the output would be the correct 6 Chinese characters. I never need to specify the tones.
So I would assume that voice recognition could do even better by analyzing tonal information.
Thanks for the link to Peter Norvig's spell checker - interesting reading there.