This is a guest post by Chris Hinton. Chris lives in Scotland with his wife and two young children. He regularly blogs at http://www.geek-speak.co.uk on all manner of geeky subjects from technology to sci-fi to web trends.
When I was studying at college in London, I started using some voice control software from IBM. I suddenly found I was able to write a two or three thousand word essay simply by speaking my thoughts and allowing the computer to transcribe them. This meant that my essays flowed more naturally and that I was able to get them written more quickly than by typing them. Of course, there were those times when the computer didn’t hear me properly and ended up with some comedy lines rather than the serious subjects was trying to deal with, but on the whole the advantage of voice control was enough for me to stick with it.
The big advantage was that the average rate of speech is around 120 to 140 words per minute, while the average computer user types at a much slower rate. Being able to speak to the computer and have it do the typing served to narrow that gap a little.
I kind of fell away from using voice control after I left college, but recently bought a copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking Home. I do a lot of writing for my blog and for sites like this one, so I wondered if using transcription software would be useful for me again. Here’s how I got on with it.
Installation
Before installing Dragon NaturallySpeaking I checked out some of the reviews online. One of them mentioned that your processor would have to support something called SSE2. This is apparently a feature of most modern processors, but it’s worth checking it out just to make sure you actually run Dragon. You can see what instruction sets your processor supports using a free program called CPU–Z (http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html).
Once I was certain my processor did support SSE2 I went ahead and ordered the software. Installation was a simple matter of putting the disc in and following the instructions. I’m not sure if the installation process is supposed to require a restart of the computer, but I didn’t seem to be able to get Dragon NaturallySpeaking to run until I had done so. A short reboot later, start Dragon up, activate online, and I was all set to begin creating my user profile.
Getting it to understand you
I have to say I am very impressed with Dragon’s ability to understand me. For a start, I have a strong Scottish accent and speak very quickly, so speech recognition software often finds it hard to differentiate one word from the next when I speak. I thought I would have to spend a long time training Dragon to recognise my style of speech, but not so.
Creating a user profile was a case of telling the computer which part of the world I’m from and how old I am. Then came some tests to ensure that the microphone was in the correct position, at the right volume, and of high enough quality. I was quite surprised when I opened the package to discover that the microphone headset was included, so that did away with any worries about not having a high enough quality microphone. Once I had got the right microphone position and volume I was invited to read a few samples of text to help Dragon better understand the way I speak. Five minutes later it was analysing my speech patterns before scanning my e-mails and word documents to work out the peculiarities of my vocabulary.
And that’s it, really. I’m now writing this review by speaking into my microphone headset. To be sure, I’m having to go back and correct words every now and again, but on the whole the process has been quite painless. If you looking for a solution to allow you to dictate documents rather than type them, I think you’ll be impressed with how well Dragon NaturallySpeaking handles it.
And there’s more…
Speech transcription is the core of what Dragon NaturallySpeaking does, but it’s also possible to give commands like “open Microsoft Word”, and even to switch between menus within applications. If you want to proofread your document, but can’t be bothered actually reading it you can have Dragon read to you. The voice certainly sounds synthetic, but it will help you hear where some of the errors are in your writing.
As you use Dragon NaturallySpeaking more, it will get better at recognising what you’re saying. You can schedule tasks that will analyse your dictation and corrections, so if Dragon is consistently mishearing a word and you’re consistently correcting it, it will eventually learn that that’s just how you say that particular word. It can also analyse your documents and add new words to the vocabulary, so it will eventually learn local place names, contacts, and perhaps even new technical terms.
Conclusion
There’s no denying that Dragon NaturallySpeaking will take some getting used to, as you learn how to make best use of speech control, and as Dragon learns your speech patterns. However, Dragon is quite simply one of the best speech recognition programs I’ve ever seen. It’s quick to set up, it can deal with my unusual accent and speech patterns, and I’m convinced it will only get better over time.
Dragon NaturallySpeaking is available from many online retailers and is produced by Nuance (http://www.nuance.co.uk/naturallyspeaking/).
