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NaturallySpeaking is naturally good
Today the nice folks at nuance.com sent me a copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 9. I love receiving toys in the mail, and this is one of the coolest ones I've received so far. For those who don't know, NaturallySpeaking is speech-to-text software that interprets what you say and types it onto the screen. It is a very intelligent program that makes good assumptions about what you are saying. It can understand e-mail addresses and phone numbers, and it formats them automatically.
Installing the program took awhile, which isn't a surprise, because NaturallySpeaking is a very large application. It probably uses a lot of memory too, and I have to admit that a little while ago, it crashed on me and I had to restart my computer. I cannot say, however, whether this was the fault of NaturallySpeaking or another one of the programs that I was using, but I have a feeling that when I am dictating it is best to simply use the DragonPad provided with NaturallySpeaking rather than to have it running while having something large such as Firefox open.
After I installed the program, it only took about five minutes of reading aloud (specifically, a few paragraphs provided from Dogbert's "Guide to Management") for the program to learn the way that I speak and adapt to it. After that I was ready to just start using the program, though I could probably make it work better if I went back and did some more training.
I can tell that NaturallySpeaking is made primarily for business use. Still, I can see it being very effective for things like blogging and writing essays. After hours of writing code and using the mouse all day, it is nice to have an alternative to typing my text, especially one that could be potentially faster than using a keyboard. I can also see how NaturallySpeaking can have less errors than typing by hand. As long as NaturallySpeaking understands what you are saying correctly (and it almost always does), you know that it will never misspell anything. In this way it is possible to go through paragraphs of text without ever having a typo. It has some problems with commonly confused words such as "where" and "were" as well as "there" and "their," but other than that it is usually solid, and it shines when it comes to understanding specific terms such as "C++."
I still have to see whether my opinions of NaturallySpeaking change over time, but as of now I can say that it is a lot of fun to work with and it has definitely impressed me. Hopefully there won't be any more crashes and I can really become an expert with the program. Come to think of it, my step dad is always saying that he shouldn't have to rely on a primitive mouse and keyboard to interact with the computer. He says that he should just be able to talk to the computer and have it understand him. I have a feeling that he would really like to see this.
And yes, as you might've guessed, I spoke this entire blog entry with the help of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I wasn't paid to do this; I like the program and reviewing it was a fun way to try it out.
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- Pingback: Contest: Win a copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking | Christian Montoya on November 23, 2006
Did you really write that we shouldn't have Firefox open when using this software. You cna't possibly mean this… you doesn't havea web browser open all day long nowadays?
I'm with you on the cool factor, but frankly, I don't think you should adapt your computing environment to a software package, I think it should adapt to you. And I sell software for a living…
ps. I'll still keep reading you, but this particular post read an awful lot like a paid marketing spot…
Jean: It's not a matter of adapting my environment, it's just a matter of using too much RAM. But I'm sure you can have them open at the same time; I just can't figure out why the program crashed.
And as for this particular post, I'll say it again: I wasn't paid to write this. They sent me a copy of the program and I reviewed it. The post might read differently because I did not type it. I spoke it like I would speak to a crowd and that changed the tone of things. I'll probably speak more posts this way because it's easier than typing. You will have to take my word for it because it really is fun to use.
Perhaps the spoken word does read differently, then again, I don't read many transcripts, so I wouldn't really know. As for RAM, yeah, I do try to max out my systems (my laptop has 2Gb for example), so maybe that could be it.
I've already tried ViaVoice in the past and remember it was a memory hog, back when PCs had a whopping 256Mb RAM. I can't imagine how memory-hungry they must be today, with multi-GB setups…
Well my laptop has 1 Gb of RAM, but I seem to have an affinity for memory-consuming programs like Firefox and jEdit. It seems like the problem wasn't related to memory though, since I have these programs running together and everything seems fine. What had happened was that I was using something called "Dictation Box" which is like a popup-textarea where you can do you speech-to-text and then click a button to have that transferred to the current application. I was using this because NaturallySpeaking doesn't work too well with forms in Firefox (not a surprise at all). When I finished my text and clicked "Transfer," it turned out that I had not selected the textarea to transfer to, so all of my text was just lost. This must have fired an error too, because while I was frantically searching for a way to restore my text, the application crashed.
This taught me a couple things:
Fortunately redoing this blog entry didn't take too long, but it's a shame that it happened because before the application crashed I had nothing but good things to say about it.
If it's of interest, tTake a look at the demonstration of Dragon NaturallySpeaking on my web site
http://www.speechempoweredcomputing.co.uk
(Click on the link "microsoft Word" in the box headed demonstrations. It'll take a minute or so to load even on a broadband connection but it'll give you an idea of the accuracy that's possible with the software.
Also check my Dragon tips and resources site at http://www.speechempoweredcomputing.co.uk/Newsletter
Peter
Dragon NaturallySpeaking reseller and accreditted trainer
Wales, UK
Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9.X sucks terribly with Firefox, I opened up Internet Explorer,a command such as click text field, navigating any part of the webpage, such as search results all worked fine.
For instance, I did a search@Yahoo.com, and copied the search results to an Internet Explorer window. In order to get the many link on webpage IE 1 to 10, you'll have to set the name of the link you want to go to in the webpage should open.however, this only works in Internet Explorer — not Firefox. As far as navigating the text boxes and edit fields, doesn't work with the download Firefox.
This is extremely frustrating, and basically forces you to use and explore, have the latest updates for Dragon NaturallySpeaking.
It's version 9, what the hell is going on, was a simple voice recognition and should not cause problems inside Mozilla Firefox, the source code to webpages exactly the same in Firefox as it is in Internet Explorer — there is no reason for this to be occurring.
PS all this text and are near a used with Dragon NaturallySpeaking I'm not sure if there are any errors and not — but always to text can be achieved for free from source Forge.net — this crap sucks. I'm pissed.
@no thanks: If it makes you feel any better, Windows Vista has native speech recognition, so there's no need for software like NaturallySpeaking anymore.