Daily Telegraph

My Word, What a Time Saver.

The Daily Telegraph - 26th March 2005

Stephen Fenech finds a Voice Recognition program worth talking about.

I DID not write this story. It might seem like I did, my name is in the byline, but I didn't write it – not in the normal sense.

I actually spoke it using Dragon Naturally Speaking. It is an impressive speech recognition software package and all I had to do was speak what I normally would have typed and it magically appeared on the screen before my eyes.

After loading the software, I had to train the program to recognise my voice and the way I pronounced my words. To achieve this I was asked to choose one of several famous presidential speeches to read.

I decided to go with John F. Kennedy's inauguration speech. Once it established my tones and pronunciation, all I had to do was undergo a few exercises to help me navigate through the text that appears on the screen. Correcting the text was surprisingly easy to do, even though the command had to be spoken. Even punctuation was recognised with pauses in your sentence substituted with commas along with full stops at the end of each sentence whenever you chose to start a new paragraph. Changing words, back spacing and deleting incorrectly spelled words was just a matter of voicing the command, before the action took place a mere second later.

You can go back and insert text as well as numbers and it will recognise proper nouns and capitalise the appropriate letters. Words which are difficult to pronounce can be spelled out for the program to easily understand. The program translated my spoken words quite accurately. The built-in vocabulary, which recognises words, not just by sound, but also by context.

You have complete control over your text, which includes copying, cutting and pasting. The program even works beyond just documents. It also allows you to select icons on your desktop's maximise and minimise windows and open and close menus. You can work with other applications including Explorer, Excel, PowerPoint and even e-mail. You can check for new e-mails, open and close individual messages and even compose an e-mail from scratch. All through your microphone without having to lay a single finger on the keyboard.

Similar control can be enjoyed when surfing the Internet using Explorer. You can go to any Web page in your favourites menu or manually enter a web address URL, go back or forward to previous web pages and even scroll within a page. The program's accuracy improves over time as it gets used to your tone and pronunciation, which means it gets even easier to use the longer you use it. Dragon Naturally Speaking has to be seen to be believed.

It's impressive enough just judging this program by its accuracy, but the amount of time you save by speaking rather than typing is what will be most pleasing. You can get through several paragraphs very quickly when it could still be stuck on the first if you had to type them out manually. For anybody who has to do any amount of writing, this program is well worth considering. The time and effort it saves could be time spent on other things.

Daily Telegraph