I Say! An Understanding Application

Even if your spouse doesn't understand you, at least now your computer will.

Steve Gillmor

Until recently, affordable speech-recognition products required you to commit a highly unnatural act. You/had/to/insert/a/short/but/distinct/pause/between/each/word/as/you/spoke. This is called discrete-speech input.

Dragon Systems' NaturallySpeaking allows users to talk normally, dictating spell-corrected text at over 100 words per minute. The product ships with a 30,000-word active vocabulary, a 230,000+ to-tal vocabulary, and a high-quality, noise-canceling microphone headset. During in stallation, a setup wizard ad justs your sound card's audio-input level and then leads you into a training session, where you read for about 20 minutes from one of several supplied book passages.

On-screen, NaturallySpeaking looks a lot like WordPad. Unique utilities include Train Words, Find New Words, and Vocabulary Editor. You can feed in a mix of your e-mail, memos, and other documents. The program scans your data, adds new words, and adjusts its vocabulary and word-usage information.

Dragon's earlier, discrete-input DragonDictate program required the user to correct errors at once. With NaturallySpeaking, you can either use the "Correct That" command now or edit later. To change a word or phrase, you say "Select," followed by the text you're looking for. Then you can replace the selection with new words or format the text. Currently, "Move to End of Line" returns you to the end of your dictated text, but Dragon plans to add a "Go Back to Where I Was" command.

You don't need a special "Alpha-Bravo" alphabet to spell out words, and you can issue commands without changing modes. With the Personal Edition, you can't dictate inside other applications (e.g., Microsoft Word and Lotus Notes), but you can move your work around with "Copy All to Clipboard," "Switch to Previous Screen," and "Paste That."

This program wants a lot of memory. I could run it along with Notes, Word, and Internet Explorer in NT Workstation 4.0 on a 64-MB Pentium-166MMX, although NaturallySpeaking still took a long 30 seconds to load from disk.

NaturallySpeaking is science fact, not fiction. It's a revolutionary breakthrough that delivers more than I expected.

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Where to Find

NaturallySpeaking Personal Edition...................$695

(Pentium 133 or faster (MMX preferred); 32 MB of 
 RAM (Windows 95) or 48 MB (NT); Sound Blaster-
 compatible sound card; 60 MB of disk space)
Dragon Systems, Inc.
Newton, MA

Phone:    617-965-5200
Internet: 
http://www.dragonsys.com/

Enter 995 on Inquiry Card.

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Ratings

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Say It Your Way

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In a short "training" period, NaturallySpeaking learns your accent and pronunciation and also lets you add specialized vocabulary.

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Steve Gillmor is a consultant for Southern Digital, Inc. (Charleston, SC). You can reach him at sgillmor@aol.com .