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January 1998
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Do You Hear What I Say?
/ A Commanding Voice for Word
Lernout & Hauspie's (L&H) command-and-control product, Kurzweil Voice Command for Microsoft Word, illustrates the basic trade-off in speech recognition: speaker dependence (including training time) versus vocabulary size. Because Voice Command needs to know only a relatively limited number of words (compared to the 20,000+ that both ViaVoice and NaturallySpeaking recognize), it can
use available computing power to eliminate the need for speaker training. Right out of the box, and with only minimal setup, it ran well and recognized commands spo
ken by a wide variety of voices.
Voice Command lets you say something a number of different ways and put together complex commands, such as: "Move the next three sentences to the end of the document."
Where does Voice Command fit in? Although there's no input or dictation capability, it has all the control power of NaturallySpeaking with a lot more flexibility, so it's a great choice for doing a lot of editing on existing copy. And by the time this review sees print, L&H may have already launched its own continuous-dictation product, Voice Express.
Matthew Wilson more...
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A Commanding Voice for Word
