| Say It with Accuracy: The Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 Review |
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Speech recognition has been around for several years. I remember being somewhat amused by recording a few words and having a robotic voice replay in monophonic tones simple phrases such as “Hello” or “Happy Birthday”. That was pretty much it. Unfortunately, voice recognition and speech to text has been implemented so poorly with meager results even as recently as four years ago. New advances in speech recognition and voice biometrics have made great strides recently. It now common to find speaker independent dialing (meaning no training necessary) available on smartphones for voice dialing, navigation and security. Even at that, the results can be mixed with factors such as ambient noise, attempts to phonically match your unique print with a generic voiceprint and most of all, very limited horsepower with the processors found on smartphones and PDAs.
Thus with reason, I was somewhat skeptical with the new release of Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 by Nuance Communications. Forget the past; I’m please to report that speech to text for the PC has made great advances in recognition.
Let’s take a look at the specs and system requirements: Intel® Pentium® / 1 GHz processor I have been using Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred 9 for several weeks. I been pretty impressed with how easy it is to set up. The tutorials are easy to understand with several practice sessions to set up all the various commands and feature sets.
I originally installed the application on a Dell Latitude 600 laptop running Windows XP Professional that has some modest specs - 512 memory and a 1.4 GHz processor. Dragon NaturallySpeaking has been able to keep up without any issues. The Dragon Toolbar is small and resides on the desktop.
More than just dictation to your PC to compose memos, letters, reviews (like this one), are ambitious attempts by Nuance to integrate command and control features. The ability to speak commands such as new line, new paragraph, space bar, tab, go to bottom (moving the insertion point to the end of the document) or saying insert before or insert after a word or group of words is pretty amazing. There are formatting commands as well. Bold that, italicize that, and underline that, Cap and All Caps. I would simply say Select and issue a formatting command. There are copy and paste functions and even a Scratch That command which deletes the last thing said. Are you amazed yet? Inserting basic punctuation is a breeze also. Just say Comma, Question Mark, Exclamation Point, Colon, Open Quote, Close Quote and more to fine tune and format your document as you speak. Obviously, this application has all of the built in functionality to allow someone to truly be a master of creating documents without using a keyboard. However, I wouldn’t throw it away yet. One of the hurdles to overcome is getting use to thinking before speaking. If you’re a rambling kind of guy, then chances are Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 will catch every bunny trail that comes out of your mouth. It also pays to enunciate clearly; otherwise running the document through spell-check won’t even come close to catching all of the bizarre words. Still, the program prefers a natural speaking style, regardless of your accent or dialect. However, like exercise, the program gets better with daily use eliminating typos over time. Doing so helps the recognition of the user’s profile, thus vocabulary is improved. You can add custom words to the vocabulary. The program get more adept at recognizing your unique style of speaking to type out everything spoken. If you’re up late at night, tired, have a mild cold - Dragon will recognize your speech even if no one else can! There is a feature to analyze your writing style by scanning documents created in Microsoft Word, html, rtf and txt files in the My Documents folder, which helps to increase the overall recognition of your speech patterns. Considering the great strides made by Nuance, it would not be a stretch of the imagination to envision powerful speech to text capabilities as a common alternative to typing, similar to the calculator replacing learning a multiplication table. There are so many practical ways to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Certainly, if you’re challenged by the physical action of keyboarding or just plain slow at it, I would certainly recommend this program. Dragon Naturally Speaking is also ideal for someone who likes to verbalize their thoughts out loud, and especially those blessed with the gift of gab like nonstop salesmen. I’ve been talking to several pastor friends and they got pretty excited over the transcription capabilities. Most churches will offer up low cost CDs of a message. Adding a transcribed printout of sermon notes with the CD is an added value. Also, most preachers will practice their sermons from an outline. Having Dragon NaturallySpeaking capture the sermon in written form will provide a working document to further perfect the sermon. Later, an assitant can format the text document into a presentable printout for distribution or archiving. One feature set includes playing back your document ONLY while the document is still open after creation. In the correction menu mode, the program saves your speaking voice so that you can playback what was just dictated. Once the document is closed, the feature is null and void. The Professional version allows saving of the speech files for later correction. This feature set is useful to discern the bizarre words that a spell checker will never make sense of! Another use is practicing a PowerPoint presentation. Dragon NaturallySpeaking does a good job of capturing all of the natural pauses, inserting commas and periods. It’s a useful tool for capturing dreaded words like “you know”, “ahh”, “umm”, and often-repeated words. Again, practice makes perfect, because the application will filter out these “ahhs” and “umms” in due time. For other examples of creative ways to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking visit here. Dennis shares this: “I have multiple sclerosis and I can only type with one finger on my right hand. I have a son in San Diego who is a civil engineer and he works on a computer every day so I contact him a lot. Since I am wheelchair-bound it is nice that I can contact my two sons. The other son works at Bath ironworks in Maine. Dragon NaturallySpeaking is a godsend for me.” This program is so feature rich that I haven’t the space to fully explain the Bluetooth wireless microphone support, dictating into handheld devices like a Palm LifeDrive or Tungsten T (no longer available) or all of the menu items. Take a look at the online user guide for complete documentation or the online demo. I’m highly impressed with Nuance’s advancement with Dragon NaturallySpeaking. The program really sizzles with daily use. I’m motivated to set aside time each night over the coming weeks to fully maximize all of the feature sets. I can imagine one day that classrooms will not only be offering typing classes (which I regretfully never took), but Dragon NaturallySpeaking classes. It’s that good! Available for $199.00, the program is well worth the investment. As for being 99 percent accurate, I’m not convinced yet – but the program has so much built in capability that it is possible. More than the accuracy factor of typed words, I’m convinced that the voice command features of dictating, editing and controlling just about any Windows-based application is the underlying gem to be fully exploited in Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 is available from the manufacturer and other retailers MSRP: $199.99 What I Like: Easy out of the box setup, works with basic PC setups, feature sets What Needs Improvement: Personal committment to fully master program
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