k, MA) says that in 1995, 44,000 dictation systems were sold. Over a million units will be sold in 1998,
the consultancy predicts.
Vendors continue to improve their products by making them more accurate, faster, and easier to use. They're also delivering tighter integration with key office applications (see the sidebar
"Battle of the Dictation APIs"
for more information). But commercial dictation programs still can't handle unconstrained-dictionary, continuous speech, which is the natural manner of talking that we use in conversations. "That's the holy grail," says Neal Bernstein, North America marketing manager for IBM Voice Recognition. Today's voice-dictation products require you to speak discretely, by speaking carefully and pausing between words.
Some analysts say that today's discrete-speech English dictation products are sufficiently fast to improve productivity. And dictation can provide tremendous benefits to users whose language requires a laborious effort to input characters. Apple says that users of its Chinese Dictation Kit for the Power Mac can input text ap
proximately five times faster than they can using the most popular Chinese keyboard-input methods. But discrete speech requires practice and might even contribute to voice strain, so efforts continue on the improvement of continuous-speech products.
Vendors are already preparing commercial continuous-speech programs with specific speech dictionaries for the medical and legal fields. Philips Dictation Systems (San Francisco, CA) says that it will release its SpeechMagic system for Windows 3.1 in March at a price to be determined (officials say it will probably sell for at least $1000). However, delivering a continuous-speech dictation product for everyday language is a greater challenge, due in part to the higher degree of variabil-ity of words that occur in casual conversation.
Estimates vary as to when an unconstrained continuous-speech dictation product will arrive. "We believe that it will be there in two to three years," says IBM's Bernstein. Others say such a time frame is optimistic, but n
ot by much.
Prices for dictation products range from $700 to $1000 or more for systems with a full-size vocabulary, but Dragon Systems also sells an entry-level version with a 10,000-word dictionary for $395. Venture Development predicts that by 1998 dictation systems will cost less than $100, which the consultancy believes is "a critical price point necessary for mass-market acceptance."
I'll Talk to You Soon
