<<Dennis, I don't buy VOICE RECOGNITION for a second, not for many many years out. I think it's hype, for many, many years yet.>>
Have any of you voice recognition naysayers tried Apple's English Speech Recognition v.1.5.4 (PlainTalk 1.5.3) since its recent release (see http:www.apple.com/speech)? It is a drastic improvement over the former version (Plaintalk v.1.5 engine) which required stiff, monotone pronunciations and still was rather buggy (missed words and misinterpreted background noises). This new version adapts to the user's voice after several commands and is actually usable to issue commands.
My family and I sat around the rev A iMac this weekend and played with it for an hour or more. Two points on this: Apple specifically claims that the iMac fan prevents the internal mic from supporting high quality speech (command) recognition. This was not the case for us, the software worked just as well as it did on my G3-PB266 with external PlainTalk mic. Second, my 4-1/2 year old daughter could command the iMac successfully even without special phoneme command constructions (adjusted for her age). It really impressed us (she particularly liked the interactive knock-knock joke AppleScript included). Bottomline: they have made huge strides over the last version in just 2 years; with Moore's Law still in effect, I don't see why we won't have commercially usable and viable (not read 'perfect') dictation software available within the next 5 years.
OFF TOPIC- since I am passing along discoveries tonight. Any of you folks using the new Beta Silicon Investor website (url on the home page)? The majority of the improvements are graphic design and organizational enhancements, but they put in a really slick new feature that allows you to view the next 10 messages in a given thread, all on a single page. It saves some time. Also the message list for a given thread is nicely improved. Any feedback on it?
Maybe Apple should buy SI? |
