Slashdot Mirror
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."
...welcome our new Dear aunt, Let's set so double the killer delete select all
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.
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.
Will it recognize metrosexual accents?
Yes, select the check box: preferences/language settings/accent/Fanboi/Apple
This is the Mac equivalent to your current setting:
options/language setings/accent/Troll/WindowsME
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
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.
The difference is that while metrosexuals try hard to be gay, homosexuals succeed.
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