The Latest Ways To Talk (and Listen) To Your PC Dragon NaturallySpeaking 7 Leads a Parade of Upgrades Eric Grevstad
Mon 3/3/03 -- Have you talked to your computer lately? (Shouting curses at a system crash doesn't count.) Chances are, you haven't -- though spoken commands and dictation are options for both Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition and Office XP, as well as the latter's rival Corel WordPerfect Office 2002 Professional, the concept of a voice-controlled PC continues to be more talked about than talked to, so to speak.
But as faster, more powerful PCs become more commonplace -- and voice-interface telephony applications such as automated receptionists and order menus become increasingly popular in corporate call centers -- PC speech is less dismissed as the stuff of Star Trek and more viable for everyday Windows users. (Developers use the phrase "speech recognition" to refer to speaker-independent command and dictation vocabularies, reserving "voice recognition" for biometric or security applications that respond to a specific person's voice.)
And though the products haven't reached WinPlanet's hands-on testers yet (stay tuned -- Ed.), a couple of recent announcements highlight the progress made on both the listening and speaking sides of the PC conversation. Let's check out what's new in both speech recognition and text-to-speech software.
Take a Letter
The biggest brand in PC dictation is Dragon NaturallySpeaking -- a pioneering product that's bounced from Dragon Systems to Lernout & Hauspie to ScanSoft Inc. Last year's NaturallySpeaking 6 wasn't a major upgrade so much as a merger of version 5 with its former competitor L&H VoiceXpress, though it was good news nonetheless in terms of ScanSoft's rescue of the product from L&H's bankruptcy.
Today ScanSoft announced NaturallySpeaking 7, which it says will finally bring speech recognition into the home and office mainstream by fixing the category's perennial hassles of setup, accuracy, and ease of use. According to the company, the new release increases accuracy by 15 percent, enabling users to achieve accuracy levels of up to 99 percent while dictating up to 160 words per minute. Initialization or training time has been cut in half, too, as users can train the software on their voice patterns in just five minutes.
Other new features include Natural Punctuation, which eliminates the need to say "period" or "comma" when dictating e-mail messages, sending instant-messaging text, or completing Web-based forms, and a Vocabulary Optimizer that analyzes sentence structure and word use frequency in existing documents and tunes NaturallySpeaking's recognition engine accordingly.
NaturallySpeaking 7 is available in Standard ($100) and Preferred ($200) editions; the latter adds specific support for Microsoft Excel 97/2000/2002 and Eudora Pro 5.1 as well as the former's Word, WordPerfect, Internet Explorer, AOL, and Outlook Express. The Preferred version can also transcribe dictation from handheld voice recorders -- and, in a new feature, Pocket PCs -- and both play back your dictation and read PC files aloud via ScanSoft's RealSpeak text-to-speech engine. Both are bundled with headset microphones.
The Dragon upgrade puts the ball back in ScanSoft's main competitor's court: IBM's ViaVoice for Windows Release 10, introduced last fall, is available in $30 Personal, $60 Standard, $70 Advanced, and $190 Pro USB versions, the last bundled with Plantronics' DRP-300, a top-quality, USB-based headset mic.
ViaVoice has a reputation for being arguably a step behind NaturallySpeaking for general PC use, but arguably a step ahead for serious dictation or heavy-duty word processing. Release 10 introduced a new speech engine with improved background-noise adaptation and one-key control of dictation and command modes.
