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The Age Newspaper
Take a note, Miss Dragon
The Age - 29th June 2004. By Charles Wright.
After those bruising rounds with the
Telstra voice response system that I've been writing about over the
past couple of weeks, I thought that perhaps something might have
happened to my diction. Maybe I forgot how to speak to a machine.
By chance, ScanSoft sent me a copy of
the current version of the Mobile edition of Dragon Naturally
Speaking, which is the voice recognition system that has impressed
me most over three to four years of intermittent use.
This version comes with a tiny digital
recorder, the SIMS. It is so tiny, it looks like a toy, but it
works. It allows you to dictate up to two hours of notes or memos or
letters, chapters of a book - if you happen to be writing a book -
while you're on the road, then come back to the office, feed the
audio into your PC, and have Dragon Naturally Speaking transcribe
everything.
If you've been reading T3 magazine you
probably won't have bothered trying this, because a recent article
described the process thus: "Can you really just leave the program
to transcribe your recordings for you? Well, no, is the simple
answer. After spending over 30 minutes training the software, the
results were, fairly unsurprisingly, just incoherent gibberish. We
expect you'd get similar results if you simply employed a bunch of
ham-fisted monkeys to bash away at a keyboard for hours on end. It'd
certainly be more entertaining."
You'll note the words "fairly
unsurprisingly". I'm convinced that they betray an unconscious bias
against the technology.
I say this because I've never had any
problems getting Dragon Naturally Speaking to transcribe my speech
accurately on as little as five or 10 minutes of training. I've
paced it at up to 130 words a minute, which is 10 words a minute
faster than I can type.
You have to train the software
separately to recognise your recorded voice, and that takes a little
longer - all of 20 minutes, or so - but even then, in my experience,
Dragon Naturally Speaking has an uncanny ability to get it right.
I also had a young colleague try it
out. He was stunned by the ability of Dragon Naturally Speaking to
faithfully type his voice when he recorded it directly into the PC.
Using the SIMS recorder, he got the same results.
Then we tracked down another user,
Peter Wheatley, who runs the PeopleWorks rehabilitation agency in
Hobart. Over six months of use, he became so attached to Dragon
Naturally Speaking and the SIMS recorder (the bundle costs $699), he
recommends it to clients.
Wheatley says a key factor in setting
it up was a session with the Australian developers of the local
dictionary Voice Perfect Systems, which has offices in the main
capitals. That costs $135 an hour.
Wheatley's personal assistant
originally feared it might make her redundant, but Wheatley says
it's helped him work so much more efficiently that he and his PA
have been able to take on additional work. He's as baffled as I am
about that other review.
The SIMS recorder works well enough for
average users, but if your office has multiple users, it might be
worth considering a more flexible digital recorder.
The system only works with digital
recorders that transfer the voice at a frequency of 11.4 megahertz.
Sony has several models that qualify, although we could only find
one in Australia - the Sony ICD-MS515. It costs $699. But it also
works with the iPaq and the Tungsten T and T2 (with Audacity
software from audiost.com).
You could use it to dictate a complaint to Telstra.
The Age Newspaper
 
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