INDEX
HISTORY
ANALOG TO DIGITAL
DIGITAL TO TEXT
FUTURE
REFERENCES
Dragon NaturallySpeaking 7
"The Best Product on the Market"
~PC Magazine
Though it was once an overcrowded marketplace, Dragon (a ScanSoft company) now stands alone as the king of voice recognition. Their latest product, NaturallySpeaking 7,
is the best commercial software ever released. Dragon claims an improvement in accuracy of over 15% from their previous version, with 7 topping out at just over 95%.
Though the results of our own testing were not quite so favorable, there are still plenty of good things to be said about this software.
The "DragonBar," which docks handily atop your desktop.
Installation/Training
Firstly, the installation is a piece of cake. All it requires, basically, is that you plug the headphones/microphone (which come standard with
the commercial package, a
nice bonus) into the back of your computer and run the CD provided. Also, the system requirements are surprisingly un-demanding: you need only a Pentium II computer of 500 MHz or more,
with 128 MB of RAM and 300 MB of free disk space. With these standards, nearly anyone who has
purchased a computer recently will be able to give NaturallySpeaking a try.
After running the program for the first time, the user is asked to begin a "general training" session, in which the software will come to recognize your voice. In some older versions of VRT software this could end up being a
rather grueling process of 30 to 45 minutes, but with NaturallySpeaking you seem to be done almost before you know it. All that is required is that you read a block of text for roughly ten minutes, and training is complete. After this, NS asks
to look through a listing of your text and Word documents. This is a very useful feature which allows the program to better understand your writing style, as well as learning any new words it may come across.
Primary Use - Dictation
With that, you are ready to begin dictating text... and for the first time we see that for all its strong points, there is still one major flaw in Dragon's latest product: accuracy. In the first few minutes of use, a number of errors
will abound. The important thing to keep in mind, however, is that you cannot expect all that much right from the start, because this is what is sometimes
referred to as "user dependant software." In other
words, the program can be only as good as you make it, and in this case your new friend will need plenty of support early on. When a word is produced wrongly, you have to correct the program by going back, highlighting the word,
and typing in what the correct response should have been. It takes a little while, but after a short time the user will begin to see improvements, and after a few weeks accuracy can, in fact, peak out somewhere near the lofty 95% range
that Dragon makes claim to.
That's "crapulence"! Silly Dragon.
Other Applications
Although, as stated, the dictation accuracy does at first leave something to be desired, it is important to note that NaturallySpeaking does perform much better right off the bat in a variety of other ways. Its strong point is most certainly
voice commands, sayings that allow you to control what happens on screen without the use of a mouse or keyboard. For instance, commands such as "Open Word" or "Open Excel" or "Open Explorer" are recognized and executed almost immediately. Once in these
applications,
you are easily able to access anything on screen just by reading its name. For instance, "File. Save As. example.doc. Save" can be done quickly, as well as something like "Insert. Page Break. OK." Speaking of IE, NS can be easily used to navigate the Web, simply by reading
the name of the link you would like to follow, and then saying "Click." The software also works reasonably well with a
variety of other applications, including Outlook Express and the popular Microsoft Excel. It is even possible to use NaturallySpeaking to move your
mouse anywhere you want on the screen, through the use of a grid system!
Recommendations
As has been briefly stated, NaturallySpeaking has a number of strong positives, but also one important negative. On the positive side, the program is relatively inexpensive (especially considering it comes packaged with a quality headset/microphone,
a major plus), is easy to install and begin using, and works very well with voice commands. Negatively, however, the dictation is just not as accurate as it would need to be in order to make a major impact on the marketplace. This is helped
by the fact that it does become more accurate in time, but the fact of the matter is that the average home consumer (or office worker) simply doesn't have the kind of time it requires to make voice recognition as effective as it ought to be.
In conclusion, this is certainly the best product on the market, but we are still going to need to see some definite improvements in accuracy if voice recognition is ever to become a real hit with the general public.
INDEX
HISTORY
ANALOG TO DIGITAL
DIGITAL TO TEXT
FUTURE
REFERENCES
|
|
