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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."
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
Tell me more about has launched a Mac version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I tried Dragon a number of times, but it feels too much like talking to oneself. Training it is a chore too. 99% accuracy after 5 minutes is probably true, but I type much better than that. I suppose it will be great for people who either can't type properly or are lysdexic.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
the whole intention of Dragon? For those people who *are* impaired in some way or another? I mean...I could never "speak" out a paper or something. I'd end up tearing my vocal cords out.
'Number-memorizing Chinese people.'-Anon
...welcome our new Dear aunt, Let's set so double the killer delete select all
Will it recognize metrosexual accents?
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
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.
"Computer... computer... hello computer?"
Am oosing it two type this comment. Didn't knead the fave mins train ming though...
Acid House saves Souls
I'll have to play with Dragon at some point; I just haven't gotten around to it yet. Aside from accuracy errors, the primary issue that bothers me about speech recognition solutions I've tried is the general lack of being able to recognize speech that seems natural to humans but isn't what the system is expecting as input.
This is especially true with over-the-telephone solutions. For example, I am with Rogers Wireless carrier here in Canada, and their automated customer service system prompts you for your phone number. My last 4 digits are 2125, and it is very natural to say "twenty-one, twenty-five" when giving the number to a human being. The speech system, unfortunately, is only sophisticated enough to understand one-digit-at-a-time mode, so you have to suffer through saying "two one two five". Which isn't truly a big deal, but it's frustrating having to learn each system's unique quirks and limits. I suppose the same can be said of any technology.
Oral dictation (as opposed to fixation) is frustrating at best. Punctuation is a critical item that I can't stand dealing with. Trying to get the goddamn software to insert commas and semi-colons can be difficult enough, let alone wanting to actually insert the word "comma" into a paragraph. Then there's trying to spell out acronyms (aka "aka"), or inserting the contents between and including those parentheses. Until dictation of a document can be done with truly minimal correction and post-editing, and can be spoken at a very comfortable pace, I will stick to a keyboard.
Of course, the most entertaining aspect of watching someone else play with speech recognition is the inevitable habit of sounding completely unnatural while speaking. The monotone voice and sounding like a robot are bad enough, let alone those who think that shouting or talking ree... aaa... llll... lllyy... sloowwwww.... llly is going to help. The funniest I've seen was a woman who seemed to think that talking in cutesy baby-talk would win the system over to her side. :)
I just want a system that responds to commands via a programmable keyword. Only when speech recognition is Star Treky enough to respond to its name will I be happy. My computer will be named Minion.
iIt iworks iso iwonderfully iand iintegrates iwell iinto ithe iother iiproducts.
I was at the Apple Dev conference in 1999 (or so) when the CEO of Dragon got up during Steve's keynote and announced that they were going to develop a Mac version of Dragon.
Almost 10 years later - and it's finally here!
Or at least a follow up announcement is here.
I was a bit put off by their pricing scheme. It's $50 off the normal price (something like $200) if you buy it at macworld. The only problem is that it's a pre-order, so you can't try before you buy. Also, nobody has reviewed the software, since it doesn't exist yet, so if it turns out to be a stinker you're out $150. And if you don't like the product, their tech support will try and "walk you through" your problem to make it go away. They explicitly said "no refunds". No, thanks.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Back in the late 90's using only Applescript and the Apple built in speech recognition I was able to voice automate my music library. I don't remember all the details, but I could start and stop the music and select what artist I wanted to hear. It was pretty neat being able to say "Computer, play Nirvana" and getting my music all from the comfort of my bed.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
I've worked with Nuance's server product in the Dragon NaturallySpeaking line as a developer. Their API is confusing, their speech recognition SUCKS, and their software bugs out in bizarre ways. It's also slow as a dog, and advanced functionality (like recognizing from wav files, as opposed to from a live audio stream) is so poorly implemented as to seem bolted on.
And the worst part? Nuance has a virtual monopoly in realistically priced (read: "in a budget that a normal small-to-medium-sized business can afford") general-purpose speech recognition systems. If I recall correctly, they bought out Lernout and Hauspie's speech recognition products and IBM's old consumer-level speech-recognition stuff. So you can't take your business elsewhere; there is no "elsewhere".
I loathe those guys.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
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.
This software's history includes jail terms. Speech recognition has gotten an extremely bad reputation for being worthless garbage, maybe because it is worthless garbage.
Even a 0.5 percent recognition failure rate is enough to make speech recognition software worse than worthless. The reason is that speech recognition software never makes a spelling mistake. Instead, the mistakes are often extremely difficult to recognize, and sometimes change the meaning in subtle ways. That's partly because when the software is confused it tries to select something that is grammatically plausible.
The result is that it has become difficult to sell speech recognition software. A high enough percentage of people in the U.S. culture know that it isn't actually useful. The orginal owners of Dragon NaturallySpeaking sold the product to a company that sold it to the company that became Nuance, maybe because they felt the product was damaging the credibility of their trademarks.
Here is a quote from the ComputerWorld story linked in the earlier Slashdot story, Is Speech Recognition Finally 'Good Enough'?:
"In 1993 two executives from Kurzweill Applied Intelligence (which pioneered SR for the medical market) went to prison for faking sales. That firm was sold in 1997 to a Belgium SR firm, Lernout and Hauspie (L&H), which was reporting phenomenal sales growth at the time. Dragon Systems, which originated DNS that year, was reporting only anemic growth, and L&H had no trouble acquiring Dragon Systems in early 2000 in a stock deal. Within a year a series of accounting frauds came to light and L&H collapsed into bankruptcy. Its SR technology was sold in late 2001 to ScanSoft Inc., which kept the DNS line going. (It was then at Version 6.0.) ScanSoft later acquired Nuance and adopted its name.
"Thereafter, "It was with the launch of Version 8.0 (in November 2004) that the market became reinvigorated and took off," said Chris Strammiello, director of product management at Nuance. "We crossed an invisible line with Version 8.0, where the software actually delivered on its promises and offered real utility for the users. Sales have been growing at a rate of 30% yearly since then, except that we expect it to do better than 30% this year."
Read that again: "... the software actually delivered on its promises and offered real utility..." I called Nuance and was told that version 8 did not have a new recognition engine, but only had improvements in the user interface. A friend who owns and tested version 8 told me he could see no difference in accuracy between that and version 7.
So, in my opinion, Nuance has done common deceitful things that are called "Marketing":
1) Bring out new versions. Previously, when there has been a "new version" of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, I call Nuance technical support and ask if there is a new recognition engine. I didn't call for version 9, but for the last two versions they have said no. So, nothing is changed; the software is still worse than useless to me, in spite of the fact that they advertise that the software is now more accurate.
How is it possible that the software is more accurate, if the recognition engine did not change? Maybe it isn't true. Or maybe the company improved the guesses the software makes when the software really has no clue what the user said. As I mentioned, those guesses have become so sophisticated that you can become confused about what you actually said, and you have to spend time re-creating your ideas. If you are saying simple things about a simple subject, this is not as much of problem as when you are writing about contract negotiations, for example.
In the words of a Slashdot reader: "The opinions expressed here may be those of my speech recognition so
I don't think dictation's the solution. If you're discelyc what you really need is a spielchucker.
And what about about people who speak dyslexically? Yes, Dubya, as it happens I am looking at you.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This is fantastic news for those who need extra accessibility features.
It may be fine for you or me to hit any key, but there are many other folks with various disabilities for whom such a task is not an easy one. So it may make more sense for them to use their voice and move on.
If any of us were to lose fingers or hands in an accident, I bet we'd all be using something like Dragon to continue our work, rather than try to become a tap dancer.
And let's not forget about accessibility in the workplace. This is great news for Mac shops, as now there is one less reason for having to support a rogue Windows machine...
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
It's fine to port this to the Mac. Fine. Good. Whoopie.
But they are so DROPPING THE BALL. They have the best voice-rec platform. (You can think it's not good enough, but it's still the best.) What they need is to port it to Linux. Duh! Wake UP!
No, I'm not just saying the usual "Does it run on Linux?" bit. Linux is the now (and coming even more) obvious OS for small devices. When you want to talk to ANY device in your home or car, or your cell phone or PDA, you'll be talking to LINUX. THAT'S where we need a great voice-rec system. We need it ported to Linux and opened for an API. This will catapult this annoying desktop app into a present on almost everything type software device in a matter of a couple of years -- as low power devices provide enough umph to do what the heavy machines of a few years ago do.
My wife needed voice dictation software a year or two ago. She had been a Linux user. I gave her my PowerBook and bought iListen for her. It was terrible. And it was a resource hog. It used the Philips engine and, even with extensive training, was the pits. We even tried several high-quality mics to no avail.
She went from my G4/1.5GHz/1.25GB RAM PowerBook running iListen to Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8 on an IBM ThinkPad T23. (P3 1GHz, 768MB RAM, WinXP.) The difference was night and day. Not only did Dragon run much faster on the lowly P3, but the quality of speech recognition was _much_ better. As a result of this, she's now back to being a Windows user with Dragon.
At least it looks like our iListen purchase won't be a complete waste, as we can use it to upgrade to NaturallySpeaking for Mac. I'm glad that MacSpeech has killed iListen. It needed it. It was an embarrassment compared to Dragon.
Speech recognition has been a big hole in the Mac's software line-up. It looks like that is finally coming to an end. Now if only someone would release something that works for Linux.* I know that we'd have paid $200 for something approaching Dragon 8's capabilities.
----
*Yes, I know about IBM ViaVoice. Good luck getting that to work on any recent distribution. I also know about Sphinx. Unfortunately, it seems to be a perpetual research tool rather than an end-user program.
Reading the comments I'm see a bunch of tabs[1] with no clue about being disabled, the speech recognition market, the history of the product, and how nuance is probably hampered by the management attitude towards money and the history of the code base.
for someone who's been disabled (temporarily or permanently) speech recognition means the difference between making a living and being able to support oneself, a mortgage, family etc. and sitting around on your ass in section 8 housing on Social Security disability. Pain from RSI once made it extremely difficult to feed myself. When you've experienced that level of pain, disability and the associated despair, you get the attitude that anything that gives a disabled person independence and an ability to make a living should be encouraged with all possible resources.
Listening to someone dictating using speech recognition will drive you mad. You would have the same problem with a blind person listening to text-to-speech. But that's not the fault of speech recognition or text-to-speech. That's the fault of management not providing the disabled person with an acoustically isolated environment (i.e. reasonable accommodat.
Desktop speech recognition is a monopoly because it's extremely expensive and difficult to develop speech recognition and there is not a large market. the market consists of lawyers, doctors, and the disabled. There is not enough money to support two companies (or more) to develop desktop speech recognition applications.
NaturallySpeaking is very buggy. There are bugs that cause people problems that were first seen in NaturallySpeaking 5. These are not hidden or hard-to-find bugs. They don't affect nuances ability to sell NaturallySpeaking. There's no reason for them to fix them except for the fact that they interfere with the use of many programs by the disabled. If you are just doing dictation into Microsoft Word or DragonPad, you'll never notice. If you try to dictate into Thunderbird, Firefox, Open office,... you're screwed. For example, I cannot dictate directly into Firefox for this comment, I need to use a workaround for dictation and then paste the result into the text box. The reason why this problem exists is because nuance management has the reputation of not making any change or feature unless you can make a business case and show them they will get revenue from that change. This is not such a bad model because it can keep nuance profitable and product available to people who truly need it (i.e. the disabled). The downside is that it doesn't leave room for changes necessary for the disabled.
I've heard from people working inside dragon that part of the problem also is the code base. It was written by a bunch of Ph.D.'s who are really really good at speech recognition but are not so good at writing code. Also in the last few years, there has the huge turnover and people working on the code as NaturallySpeaking was sold first to L&H and then to nuance. That kind of change alone will wreak havoc on the code base as knowledge is lost and never really acquired by the new people. by the way, I have talked with some people from nuance, and they are basically good people. They understand the needs of the handicapped but they are constrained in what they can do for us because of budget and resources.
When people talk about alternatives with open source speech recognition, only a tab would think they would work for the disabled. Their recognition speed is significantly slower, vocabulary size is smaller, and they are really more projects to keep grad students busy than be anything useful in the real world.
The last problem with speech recognition sits in your lap if you are a manager of a software product or a developer. As far as I can tell, the number of applications that are speech recognition friendly is vanishingly small. It seems to me that software developers go out of their way to make software handicap hostile. It starts with the multiplatform GUI toolkits that do not
I'm a radiologist who uses a Nuance product for several hours a day, every day, and my experience has been overwhelmingly positive. Whereas I used to waste a great deal of time editing and correcting mistakes by human transcriptionists, I only occasionally have to manually correct the Nuance transcriptions. Our throughput and efficiency have increased considerably since we started with the product, and there is absolutely no way that I'd ever return to the previous system. The adoption of speech recognition has been the biggest advance in my field since digital imaging, IMO. Oh, and "when the software is confused it tries to select something that is grammatically plausible"? I don't think so - the software has no concept of grammar.