John, this article sure agree's with your assessment.
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Hot Stuff
Voice Recognition Grows Up
Michael J. Himowitz
When my son Ike was 4 years old, I traded a spare disk drive for a gadget that was supposed to let you talk to a computer. I thought he'd get a kick out of it.
What he got was incredibly frustrated. It couldn't understand a thing he said, and to this day I feel a pang of sympathy when I picture him, glaring at the screen, shouting into the microphone, "Read my lips!"
Last night I found Ike in my office, talking to the computer again. This time he was speaking softly. His words, or most of them, appeared quickly on the screen, with proper spelling and punctuation. Ike said he'd like to keep this software--when he leaves for college in a couple of weeks. Some technologies just take a while to mature.
Ike is hooked on NaturallySpeaking, from Dragon Systems of Newton, Mass., the first voice-recognition program for PCs that transcribes continuous speech--the normal talking you and I do every day. While Dragon and other companies have published voice translators for years, until now they've all required users to pause after each word, a nuisance most people just won't tolerate.
Once you've tuned NaturallySpeaking to your voice--an easy process--all you have to do is fire it up and start talking. Your words drop into a text screen, where you can edit or format them with voice commands, or use the more prosaic keyboard-and-mouse routine. When you're through, just paste the text into your word processor. It's neat, and it works.
Who can benefit from NaturallySpeaking? Anybody who hates to type or can't type well, or who wants to avoid repetitive strain injuries. If you use a dictating machine, think of NaturallySpeaking as a digital stenographer that can turn out a decent first draft and save your flesh-and-blood secretary a lot of work.
You won't find NaturallySpeaking in the bargain bin: the package lists for $695 and sells on the street for about $300, including a headset microphone. You'll also need heavy-duty hardware to run it. Dragon recommends a 133-MHz Pentium computer with 32 megabytes of memory and the Windows 95 or NT operating system. My Hewlett-Packard desktop meets those specs, but NaturallySpeaking slowed it to a crawl. When I switched to a high-end Gateway multimedia laptop with a faster processor and 64 megabytes of RAM, the software performed like a champ. You'll also need a good sound board; Dragon recommends an industry-standard SoundBlaster 16 or a compatible equivalent. Before you buy, find out which board you have and check with Dragon to make sure it will work.
Once you've cleared the hardware hurdles, Dragon's setup routine is a snap. Just plug the mike into your sound board and spend 45 minutes reading passages from the screen so the software learns to recognize your voice.
Dragon claims that NaturallySpeaking will process up to 150 words per minute with 95% accuracy. My results weren't quite that good, but they were impressive. The program rarely missed when I read from newspapers or books. When I recited Romeo's soliloquy, the program did have trouble with "vestal livery," which came out "best delivery." It also had difficulty distinguishing "man" from "men." I occasionally got ahead of the program too, but it always caught up.
One more caveat: You can't train NaturallySpeaking to recognize more than one user's voice. Ike sounds like me, so he got decent results. But I found out that by using the program he was polluting my voice files, and I had to train it again from scratch. The company says future releases may be able to accommodate more than one user.
For the kind of money Dragon is asking, Mom and Dad should be able to share the software. But if you're the only user, NaturallySpeaking is as close to magic as you'll get on a personal computer. For information, call 800-825-5897 or 617-965-5200, or point your Web browser to dragonsys.com.
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Imagine how many they would sell if it was in the 100 dollar or less range.
Michael |
