"Do you talk to your computer often?" my sister asked yesterday when we were chatting on the phone. She heard me swearing at it when I was in the middle of attempting to upgrade to Windows 7. The truth is I do talk to my computer frequently ("please don't crash, not now, please"). The problem is it rarely understands me, and almost never listens, even if it does. Voice recognition software has promised to change all that - it even got snuck into Vista. But, the truth is more than ten years since I first tried voice recognition, its results have been pretty comical.
My review method is always pretty much the same with this sort of software: I write the review (including this one) by dictating it and see what mangled results come out of the software. Usually, what I "say" has nothing to do with what the computer interprets. Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 changes all that. It is incredible software, absolutely capable of listening to what I say as I speak in a natural cadence and transcribing it, nearly flawlessly.
Installation is simple on my laptop, running XP with 2 gig of ram. The hardest part was getting my laptop to work with the supplied headset. This was not a fault of the software, but of a faulty sound card driver. After getting that resolved, and then loading the software from the CD, I took a few minutes to read one of the supplied training texts aloud. The computer used this material (President Kennedy's inaugural speech) to learn the the nuances of my speaking.
I'm a pretty fast typist. Before using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 I probably would have told you that I type as fast as I can think. I now know that is wrong. With the Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 I am able to get my thoughts on paper astonishingly fast and accurately by simply speaking what is on my mind.
Yes, errors still sometimes crop up. For example, consider the following text at the computer interpreted, repeated here warts and all: "The Sun also rises. His son came down for breakfast. Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York." In the first sentence there was no reason to capitalize the word sun, unless the computer was considering it part of a title (in which case "also rises" should also have been capitalized). Note however, that from context the computer used to the proper homonym (a word, by the way it did not know how to spell). However, it got tripped up by the Shakespearean pun from the opening of Richard III, substituting "sun" for "son". Interestingly, I sometimes make these same mistakes when touch typing, when my mind races ahead of my fingers on to the next thought.
There are still some words, phrases, and punctuation situations which have me reaching for the keyboard. I haven't installed any special medical or legal dictionaries so Latin phrases, for example, might not come out correctly. I'll let one example speak for itself: "res ipsa loquitor" came out "race it's a local tour". However many modern terms such as "wi-fi", "Bluetooth", and "Vista", were properly recognized and capitalized.
The key to Dragon's success is its ability to place dictated words in context and make intelligent decisions based on the way words are used. While the program doesn't always guess correctly, after a while it trained me to know what sort of situations would give it trouble. Usually, this is where the use of the word is grammatically ambiguous. An example of this is where a word that might be a noun or a proper noun is placed in quotations. While writing about the "Vista operating system" was properly capitalized, putting the same word in quotation marks was not. The program had no trouble with the sentence: "looking outside he saw the vista was breathtaking".
The bottom line is that you still have to prove (sic) your work. Yes, I know - it typed "prove", not "proof". If you get a word that the program can't recognize you can train it. When I saw the word had been improperly spelled in the first sentence of this paragraph I right clicked on it which brought up the correction menu. The proof that the program learn the word is that it properly spelled it in the sentence.
Several versions of the Dragon NaturallySpeaking software are available. For most users, the "Preferred" version (at $199) will give sufficient power and flexibility to do basic dictation and computer control by voice command. The six hundred dollar leap in price to "Professional" is massive, and not warranted unless you need its special features which include templating, advanced macros, and deeper control and support for Word, Outlook, Powerpoint and Lotus Notes. Most small business and home users looking primarily for dictation input will find satisfaction in the less expensive versions of the engine.
Simply put, Dragon Naturally Speaking, though not inexpensive should be in every writer's toolkit. It will change the way you interact with your computer. Now when you swear at it, it will know what you're saying!
