Mac Version of NaturallySpeaking Launched

WirePosted writes "MacSpeech, the leading supplier of speech recognition software for the Mac, has canned its long-running iListen product and has launched a Mac version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the top-selling Windows speech recognition product. MacSpeech had made a licensing agreement with Dragon's developer, Nuance Communications. The new product is said to reach 99% accuracy after 5 minutes of training."

Comments

Whatever became of this technology?

[lhaeh]

The last time I tried using voice dictation was When I was running OS/2 Warp 4. Training took forever, and the experience of using it was nothing but an exercise in frustration, ending with me screaming at the bloody thing then seeing neat, yet random expletives on my screen. I later came across some budget software that required no training, yet worked surprisingly well compared to the $400 packages made by the big boys. That software really showed what voice diction should be like, if only it was developed further.

The training an accuracy seem like things that can be overcome, but I would really like to see a solution for things like punctuation and function keys, things that don't naturally come with speaking. Instead of having to say "delete that" or " delete" it would be nice to just have a button that I can hold down when saying things I want interpreted as commands.

Re:Whatever became of this technology?

[jimicus]

A few things became of the technology:

1. 99% accuracy rate is actually pretty bad in the real world. In a typical document, you might expect 12-15 words per line - so you have one error every 7 lines or so.
2. 99% accuracy rate is only achievable under ideal circumstances - ie. using a top quality microphone hooked up to a good soundcard in an environment with very little background noise and no echo. Basically, circumstances you only get in a half-decent recording studio. In the real world, you seldom get this.
3. Unless you happen to be blessed with amazing self-discipline (and/or can guarantee that nobody is going to approach you while you're working). Otherwise you get back to work after a distraction and find yourself having to delete a conversation you just had with a co-worker.
4. If you're in an open-plan office (that's probably about 99% of UK offices these days) your colleagues will not thank you for spending all day talking.

Accessibility

[Selanit]

Five minutes training for most people, but not everyone. My boss uses Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and it took him nearly two weeks to complete the five-minute training due to some complications.

Namely, he's blind. He cannot read the training phrases off the screen, because he can't see them. Instead he had to have a screen reader (JAWS in this case) read the phrases aloud to him so that he can repeat them back. But of course, Dragon was not expecting to hear audio input from anything other than the user, so that confused things. There were problems even using a headset. And since he can't actually use the program at all without having the screen reader running, it was pretty awful trying to get the training done. I'm not even sure how he finally managed to do it - I suspect he probably got a sighted friend to help. Thankfully the training files can be copied from one computer to another so you don't need to retrain it on each different installation.

Once the training was finally finished, it worked well. He has poor fine motor control as a result of leukemia treatments - he can type, but only slowly and with a high error rate. His speech is slightly slurred as well, which reduces the accuracy of the transcription. Even so, the Dragon transcriptions are definitely better than manual typing. It's helped him a lot.

I just wish that the Dragon programmers would come up with a more easily accessible training routine. There aren't a whole lot of users with the same disabilities as my boss, but for the few like him having good, well-trained dictation software is vital. With it, he can control his computer reasonably well, if rather more slowly than a sighted person with normal motor control. Without it, using the computer is basically impractical. When he can't use Dragon, sending a single rather short email can take upwards of an hour.