» by Malcolm on Mon 16th Feb '09 12:41PM
9/10
Brilliant. Just brilliant.
This is a piece of Macintosh dictation/speech recognition software whose underlying recognition engine comes from the famous and, as I understand it, very successful DragonDictate people. I've had it since Friday (today is Monday), and frankly it has already changed my life.
A small piece of background information. I've been off work for the last three weeks with a kind of tendonitis caused initially by far too much computer use, and since exacerbated by doing pretty much anything at all with my right hand. So, I've spent three weeks trying to fill my days in ways that are both interesting and only require one hand. (Okay, that joke pretty much told itself, so let's just all agree to note the innuendo and move on.) But now, here I sit, talking to all of you on the forum, whilst reclining in a chair and with neither hand anywhere near the keyboard. This software, frankly, is amazing.
I'd say dictation is certainly its most impressive feature. The clever thing is that it analyses your entire utterance altogether, rather than attempting a word by word recognition, which massively improves its accuracy as it looks at the entire context of what you're saying and compares it to everything it knows you have said before. It also means that you sit back, dictate an entire paragraph, and only when you've finished does the entire thing appear in front of you. But as well as dictating, it can control almost every aspect of your computer: clicking buttons, launching applications, and so on. And the weird thing -- which I really can't emphasise the strangeness of enough -- is that it's nearly always correct!
It has taken a little bit of time to get used to -- above all, because I'm completely unused to structuring my thoughts in my mind before starting to speak them! -- and the best results, it's well worth reading the fairly accommodated instructions and putting a little bit of effort into training it to recognize your voice and vocabulary. But, pretty easily and pretty quickly, I am now sitting here speaking to it at virtually my full fluent rate of speech. It is definitely much faster than typing, even if you include the occasional tinkering round to correct things. But I'd say it needs less correction than a normal typed document does.
Amazing.
This is a piece of Macintosh dictation/speech recognition software whose underlying recognition engine comes from the famous and, as I understand it, very successful DragonDictate people. I've had it since Friday (today is Monday), and frankly it has already changed my life.
A small piece of background information. I've been off work for the last three weeks with a kind of tendonitis caused initially by far too much computer use, and since exacerbated by doing pretty much anything at all with my right hand. So, I've spent three weeks trying to fill my days in ways that are both interesting and only require one hand. (Okay, that joke pretty much told itself, so let's just all agree to note the innuendo and move on.) But now, here I sit, talking to all of you on the forum, whilst reclining in a chair and with neither hand anywhere near the keyboard. This software, frankly, is amazing.
I'd say dictation is certainly its most impressive feature. The clever thing is that it analyses your entire utterance altogether, rather than attempting a word by word recognition, which massively improves its accuracy as it looks at the entire context of what you're saying and compares it to everything it knows you have said before. It also means that you sit back, dictate an entire paragraph, and only when you've finished does the entire thing appear in front of you. But as well as dictating, it can control almost every aspect of your computer: clicking buttons, launching applications, and so on. And the weird thing -- which I really can't emphasise the strangeness of enough -- is that it's nearly always correct!
It has taken a little bit of time to get used to -- above all, because I'm completely unused to structuring my thoughts in my mind before starting to speak them! -- and the best results, it's well worth reading the fairly accommodated instructions and putting a little bit of effort into training it to recognize your voice and vocabulary. But, pretty easily and pretty quickly, I am now sitting here speaking to it at virtually my full fluent rate of speech. It is definitely much faster than typing, even if you include the occasional tinkering round to correct things. But I'd say it needs less correction than a normal typed document does.
Amazing.
