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To: WebDrone who wrote (25402)	7/11/1999 3:49:00 PM
From: J R KARY	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213173

Sony & Dragon to ship new speech technology for Japan ; Handspring ? Web you are right as speech recognition systems need initially to be more application specific and limited . I suspect Dragon speech product is for telephony applications on Sony high end lap tops . Dragon is developing speech technology by year-end for AAPL but the Sony Japan product is due this September . Starting in July 2000 Sony is to use wireless links to the internet : nikkeibp.asiabiztech.com It caught my attention as Dragon's product is for a "portable" . I can't see AAPL waiting (P1 ?) until January for its Dragon speech product , which hopefully will include English. ---- Handspring is a mystery . When the Palm Prez left recently I searched her background and came across Handspring . Handspring seems to hold the "rights" to Palm and different think hand-held products . Handspring is a operational Silicon Valley company but my net search for its products were fruitless . US Robotics purchased rights for Palm from Handspring which then went to 3COM . Handspring's press releases provide a lot of Palm product history and worth a read if you thimk AAPL plans a similar but different product: handspring.com (Link not working ? it did a few weeks ago and YAHOO still lists it ) Jim K.

To: WebDrone who wrote (25402)	7/11/1999 7:53:00 PM
From: MeDroogies	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213173

How about this: Palm VII is compelling, but not compelling enough. Tack on digital phone capabilities, and paging, and you have a seriously compelling piece of hardware. I'm betting AAPL picks it up, and with ORCL/AOL/SUNW, they put out a beauty that pretty much does it all for you..... Agree 100% w/the voice recognition thing. I've got it. It sucks. I still wind up typing most of my stuff. Totally contextual problems inherent in it, not to mention accents, speed of speech, and slang/colloquialisms. They all cause problems and will probably continue to do so until all PCs are close to supercomputers.

To: WebDrone who wrote (25402)	7/12/1999 12:13:00 AM
From: Brian Collins	Respond to of 213173

<<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?