Natural Dictation Wins Best of Comdex

BYTE Editors

Dragon Systems' NaturallySpeaking ($695), a Windows program that lets you speak naturally to your PC as you dictate text, won BYTE's Best of Show award at Comdex. BYTE's awards recognize new products that are innovative and will impact the industry. NaturallySpeaking (for more information, see the Eval "I Say! An Understanding Application"), slated to ship this summer, won because it's the first general-purpose, large-vocabulary product we've seen that lets you dictate to your PC without having to pause between each word.

The Iridium project, a satellite-based, wireless personal communications network, won the Best Technology award. The Iridium constellation will consist of 66 interconnected satellites that will allow voice, data, fax, and paging traffic to reach its destination anywhere on earth. Iridium is slated to begin operation in 1998. Best Technology finalists were Microsoft's "Wolfpack" fail-over clustering, which will soon b e part of the Enterprise Edition of the NT OS (slated to ship in the third quarter), and Harris Semiconductor's FingerLoc System, a complete personal fingerprint-identification system in a low-cost IC chip set.

A finalist in the Best Application/Utility category was AnySoft's Any97 , a user-component-management system that lets you assemble your own task-specific applications that use Any97's included components or OLE Server components. Support for ActiveX and Java is due this summer. The other finalist was Intrasoft's KeyVision, which lets network administrators manage multiple Windows 95 and NT system registries simultaneously from the Web.

Best Portable winner was Gateway's Solo 9100 , a high-end, 8-1/2-pound notebook packed with a 13.3-inch display, up to 192 MB of SDRAM, USB and NTSC in and out ports, and many other features at prices starting at $4200. Finalists were Toshiba's 3.8-pound Portégé 300CT (about $3499), which has a 133-MHz Pentium with an MMX CPU and a 1024- by 600- pixel display; and Toshiba's Satellite 6.9-pound 440CDX, a 133-MHz Pentium with MMX-based notebook available with a TFT or Toshiba's FastScan display. It delivers active-matrix-like display quality, but with passive-matrix's lower weight and power requirements, for about $2500.

Matrox Graphics' Millenium II graphics accelerator card (from $269), which provides 2-D and 3-D graphics acceleration (including support for a 32-bit z-buffer for improved depth precision) and up to 16 MB of WRAM, won for Best Multimedia Hardware. Finalists were ATI's Xpert@Play 2-D/3-D graphics accelerator and Xirlink's USB Digital Video Phone, an audio/video digital camera that connects to a PC via the USB port.

In the Multimedia Softw are category, the winner was MetaCreations' Kai's PhotoSoap, which brings high-quality photo cleanup to a new level of ease and affordability (for more information, see the What's New Software Preview). Finalists were LogOn Technologies' e-Logic, a powerful interactive multimedia marketing applications suite for the Web, and MetaCreations' Ray Dream Studio 5, a new version of the 3-D animator for Windows and the Mac that adds new animation, rendering, and object-creation tools.

Best Connectivity Solutions winner was Hilgraeve's DropChute+, a product slated to ship this summer that reliably transfers files over phone lines or the Internet. Finalists were Bay Networks' Instant Internet 4.0, which adds high-speed Internet connectivity options from 56-KBps DDS to T1, and Equinox's SuperSerial Modem Pool PAC Option with EquiView Plus release 2. Equinox's product is an Ethernet-ready NT Remote Access Server in a box plus software.

The award for Best Workstation went to IBM's Intellistation M Series, whi ch features a Pentium II and support for advanced desktop-management features, such as Wake on LAN and LANdesk client support. Finalists were Digital Equipment's Celebris GL-2 dual-CPU-capable Pentium II NT system and Personal Workstation 500au, which can run NT or Unix.

Winner of the award for Best Peripheral was Nikon's Coolpix 300 Personal Imaging Assistant, which offers powerful imaging and communications capabilities in a pocket-size unit. Finalists were Visionics' FaceIt PC, face-recognition software that uses monitor-mounted cameras to identify a user's face for computer access, and Visioneer's Paperport Strobe Scanner, an updated version of the company's scanner with document-management software that adds support for color.

Arpeggio Live, Wall Data's ODBC-compliant database and host-system data-publishing tool, won in the Best Web/Internet Product category. Finalists were Cardiff Software's Teleform, an HTML forms creator, and TSP Companies' OpalisRendezVous, a file-synchronization add-on tool to Windows NT.

Antares Alliance Group's EdgeworX release 1.1 won the Best Development Software category for bringing the familiarity of Visual Basic for Applications to Web-site development. Finalists were Hitachi's Appgallery, a rapid prototyping tool that uses AI techniques to automate the linking of ActiveX and CORBA objects, and ChiliSoft's ChiliASP, which allows Active Server applications to run on Web servers other than Microsoft's Internet Information Server.

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A Portable Range

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Gateway's Solo 9100 won the Best Portable category at Comdex.

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No Programming? No Problem!

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Any97 lets you build applications from components without programming.