Voice Recognition: Ready for Prime Time
PC World - July 2005. By Stephen
Manes
PC World - Contributing Editor Stephen Manes's pointed
commentary on everyday computing headaches, technology trends, and
more.
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At long last, talking to your PC really makes sense.
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It may be a little premature,
but I already have a pretty good idea about my nominee for next
year's World Class Product of the Year. I'm not entirely sure which
product I'll root for, but I'm almost positive it will have
something to do with broad-vocabulary speech recognition.
Yes, I know the old joke:
Useful speech recognition is just three years away--and has been for
two decades now. Even these days, I suspect, the technology will be
slow to catch fire, mainly because people won't believe that it can
work as well as it does. But two products have shown me that speech
recognition (and I don't mean just the limited-vocabulary stuff that
phone-mail-hell systems use) has become downright powerful.
For years, Dragon
NaturallySpeaking (now owned by ScanSoft) has been the best voice
dictation product. Now version 8 of the application fulfils its
predecessors' promise by delivering lots of little improvements that
add up to much greater usability. Not only does the software present
a more-useful-than-ever list of alternatives when you tell it that
it has made a mistake, but now it allows you to correct your own
verbal mistakes by selecting the error and then saying what you
actually meant.
A new auto-punctuation mode
attempts to insert periods at the ends of sentences, but it's so
limited and inconsistent that you're better off sticking with the
old-fashioned practice of speaking all the punctuation marks. And
it's a shame the software can't automatically return you to the spot
where you were working before you stopped to correct an earlier
word. On the other hand, the software lets me talk fast, even on a
five-year-old machine. And more than once I've dictated a quick
draft on my notebook; the software's included noise-cancelling
headset now goes into my travelling bag on every trip.
NaturallySpeaking Professional
has a distinctly corporate focus and costs $700. But for most
people, the $190 Standard or $180 Preferred edition will work just
fine.
Right as I was beginning to
realize how cool Dragon is, I spent some time with VoiceSignal's new
VoiceMode software. Unlike NaturallySpeaking--which lets you talk
pretty much the way you normally do, except for the
punctuation--VoiceMode requires
that...you...say...every...word...separately. Amazingly, though, it
works not on a PC with lots of RAM and a fast CPU, but on a lowly
cell phone that costs just $80 with a two-year contract.
Thanks to its built-in
VoiceMode, Samsung's P207 phone, which is available from Cingular,
allows you to speak text messages--and it's sufficiently accurate to
be genuinely practical. Dictation would be even more welcome in an
advanced handheld that can do e-mail, but even in this relatively
basic phone it can free your thumbs from agony. In addition, the
P207 lets you dial a contact's number from your address book by
saying that person's name--a less impressive trick, perhaps, but a
valuable one nonetheless.
The standard boffo ending to a
column like this is the revelation that it was dictated, not
typed--and indeed, I wrote this with NaturallySpeaking. But we're
getting to the point where voice recognition, in an array of
products, should be considered just another way to work faster and
better. World Class, I'm talking to you--and I don't mean in 2008.
Contributing Editor Stephen
Manes is co-host of PC World's
Digital Duo, a weekly series
broadcast on public TV stations throughout the country.
PC World
 
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