|
PC World Australia
Dragon talks the talk, naturally.
PC World Australia
- 12th November 2004. By Howard Dahdah.
ScanSoft is looking for word crunchers
to do away with typing, claiming the latest version of its speech
recognition software to be 99 per cent accurate and capable of
interpreting words spoken at 160 words per minute
Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8, released
this week, also has a 19 per cent improvement for Australian users
(accents), said company regional productivity manager, Bob Anderson.
"Technological advancements have made this product work more
successfully," he said.
Anderson said he preferred to call
Dragon NaturallySpeaking a desktop dictation or transcription
product rather than speech recognition, as it was a more accurate
description.
NaturallySpeaking is licensed on a per
voice basis. That means a person can buy it for the home, but in
theory it is only licensed for that person's voice and not the whole
family. But per voice also means the licence holder can install the
software on multiple devices such as their PC, notebook, and
handhelds.
The product is priced at $199.95 for
the Standard version and $399.95 for Preferred. Both products ship
with a noise-cancelling microphone.
The latest version supports Palm
Tungsten devices. Support for Windows CE devices is already offered.
In a demonstration, Greg Findlay from
ScanSoft partner, Voice Perfect, took about five minutes to set up a
new user account. During this process the new user selects
predetermined text to read aloud. As they read the text back into
the microphone the software learns to recognise the user's voice and
records that into its memory. Once that is done the user is ready to
begin.
Before dumping all the spoken text into
the Word document, the software retains it in a buffer and
contextually sorts it. By assessing words in the buffer, it provides
for greater accuracy and it reduces the chances of it being confused
by homophones, for example, "red" and "read" or "no" and "know".
The software supports all Microsoft
Office applications: Microsoft Word, Outlook, Excel and Access as
well as Corel's WordPerfect. It is not limited to that, users can
also surf the Web by speaking URLs and links.
To install, NaturallySpeaking needs an
Intel Pentium III 500 MHz processor (or equivalent AMD processor),
300MB free hard disk space and 256MB RAM. However, Findlay said
users really should have 512MB installed to get maximum benefits.
Findlay said a series of modules that
added custom dictionaries for vertical industries such as medicine,
manufacturing and law were also available.
PC World Australia
 
|
