Regarding adaptation:
Apple has this to say, "The more you use Siri, the better it will understand you. It does this by learning about your accent and other characteristics of your voice. Siri uses voice recognition algorithms to categorize your voice into one of the dialects or accents it understands. As more people use Siri and it's exposed to more variations of a language, its overall recognition of dialects and accents will continue to improve, and Siri will work even better".
Adam Cheyer, Co-Founder and VP Engineering of Siri posting on Quora says, " Siri learns over time (new words, new partner services, new domains, new user preferences, etc.)” In a separate post he says, “...after about 20 voice interactions with Siri, the system would typically have enough data about the user's voice to have covered the bulk of the adaptation process".
One option that Dictation on the Mac allows for that isn’t available on iOS, is to create user defined, spoken commands. With Dictation set to “On" and “Use Enhanced Dictation” selected in the Dictation & Speech pane of System Preferences, you can set up your command from the Accessibility pane to automatically paste text such as ""ARES/RACES”" whenever you speak a short user selected phrase such as “aries slant reesie's”.
For instance, to have OS X Dictation type (exactly as it appears):
I say the Amateur radio-acronym, "ARES/RACES”
You would say :
I say the cap amateur radio hyphen acronym comma space bar quotation mark aries slant reesie’s end quote
I found the user defined command always achieved the desired result. This suggests, as guidance toward accuracy, to speak the acronym first to see how Dictation interprets it in text, and then use that text as the triggering command, with a close approximation to how you pronounce it. Note: the Tab spaces indicate where it was necessary to pause, which may be singular to my specific conditions.
To achieve a near same result with iOS, I found it useful to spell out the individual letters of the acronym and use the “caps on/off” and “no space on/off” commands:
I say the cap amateur radio hyphen acronym comma quote caps on no space on a-r-e-s slash r-a-c-e-s end quote caps off no space off
This is the best result achieved:
I say the Amateur radio-acronym, "ARES/RaCES”
Close to the desired result, but notice the consistent anomaly of the lowercase “a”, which contradicts the “caps on” command under which it presumably is operating. Also notice the differences in command preferences by Dictation on the two platforms: "space bar” vs the automatic insertion of a space, "quotation mark” vs "quote"
Simply spelling out the acronym without the “caps on” and “no space on” commands, invariably gave one of the following results:
I say the Amateur radio-acronym, “AR ES/R a CES”
or:
I say the Amateur radio-acronym, “a RES/R a CES”
Dictation occasionally had difficulty with the word “say”, substituting similar sounding words such as “same” or “save”. This highlights the challenge for phoneme recognition and probabilistic algorithms, initiated by variable and indistinct enunciation.
Dictation commands you can use in OS X
Use Dictation Commands to tell your Mac what to do
Control your Mac and apps using spoken commands
SIRI RISING: The Inside Story Of Siri's Origins
Talking to Machines
How Speech Recognition Works
Speech recognition
Why isn't speech recognition software more accurate?
Why is Siri important?
What can Siri do that other speech recognition technologies cannot?
