[Rhodes22-list] Re: voice recognition programs

[Bill Effros]

Tom,

There used to be several companies developing speech recognition 
software.  During the dot-com years, one of the companies started buying 
up all of the others, using its stock.  Then it turned out that they 
were cooking the books, and they went bankrupt.

In the process of buying up all the others, the different software teams 
were broken up, so it was impossible for the various companies to put 
themselves back together.  Only one program survived--Dragon--which 
contained the retained features of all the different software.

Scansoft -- now called Nuance -- bought the rights to all of the 
software that had been developed.

This is probably the only instance in all of recorded history in which 
the best features of all the different programs wound up in the software 
finally offered to the public.  Kurzweil was very good with Artificial 
Intelligence, but their speech engine looked at individual words as they 
were spoken with pauses between each word.  Dragon had an excellent 
continuous speech engine, but it was impossibly difficult to correct.  
Others had better syntax parsers, more extensive built-in vocabularies, 
greater regional dialect interpreters, etc.

I used several different systems over the years.  I wound up entering 
using Dragon, and correcting using Kurzweil.

Now I am using only Dragon 8.  The Dragon 8 system works best if you 
enter into its own "notepad" and cut and paste into your final 
document.  This was always one of the weaknesses of Dragon.  Dragon 8 
will work properly with most Windows software, but it works best with 
its own note pad which is a cut down version of Word, without the bells 
and whistles that slow it down.

Dragon 8 will enter into any program faster than you can accurately 
type--but in order to achieve top speed -- it can literally enter as 
fast as I can speak--and it can enter much faster than I can think -- 
with 99.75+ accuracy -- you've got to enter into its notepad.  Also, 
this keeps voice commands consistent, making the system easier to learn 
and use.

Basically, Dragon 8 is the only one left standing.  Spending time with 
it is required to improve its accuracy, and to learn the voice commands 
that allow you to control it, instead of the other way around.

The learning curve is less daunting, now that it is so good out of the 
box.  But people treat it as a curiosity if they fail to use the 
built-in artificial intelligence to customize the program to their own 
individual voices.

Don't let anyone else try out your system after you've trained it.  
Demonstrate it to them; let them set themselves up as a user; but don't 
let them mess up your profile.

No, I didn't write this using Dragon.  Any time I write more than a 
paragraph it would have taken less time had I used Dragon.  But when I 
think I'm just dashing off a quick note, which then expands...

Bill Effros







SVTRITON at aol.com wrote:

>thanks all
>i havent seen the Al reference ...all i see is the preferred, professional,  
>legal and medical...im looking on _www.speechtechnology.com_ 
>(http://www.speechtechnology.com) ...  how  do i tell its an Al.
>tom
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