Naturally Speaking - Preferred Edition

Dragon Systems

Voice recognition technology has come a long way - but it still has a long way to go. In the film 2001, Hal, the computer, could understand and respond to the voice commands of the crew. In the reality of 1998, voice recognition software can accept dictation only from users whose voices it has been trained to recognise. But the advances of recent years mean that voice recognition software is likely to become a standard feature of new PC systems, and be a third mechanism, after the keyboard and mouse, for interacting with the machine. And the uses won't stop there; simultaneous translation, vocalised texts (the computer reading text files to the user) and voice controlled electronic systems in the home and office will become familiar features of our environment.

A lot of this development is due to Dragon Systems, who have been technology leaders in this field. Although still privately owned, they are one of the US's largest software houses, and they specialise solely in voice recognition. Until recently their products have only been available in the UK through resellers, but now Dragon have launched direct in Europe, with Dixons and Computer World being major retail outlets.

How does it work? The following two paragraphs were dictated into NaturallySpeaking during the initial training session:

As a new century approaches we are faced in offices throughout the world with machines which still rely upon an input device developed in the late nineteenth century. The input device is of course the keyboard to your computer whose basic layout years derived directly from the typewriter. I still uses the familiar QWERTY keyboard, designed to keep the users to a speed which the mechanical typewriter code cope with.

But how much longer? Speech recognition software he is developing at a phenomenal rate and its price is falling to level which makes it as accessible as a computer game. And it is not just our desktop computers which will experience a revolution; within our lifetimes we can expect a whole range of services which currently require a person to act as an interface to be able to receive oral information and to respond with speech which is indistinguishable from a real persons. At least those are the forecasts.

Absolutely perfect? No, there are some errors, but minor, and these should be reduced in time as the software learns to recognise my voice. Was it quicker? No, the training takes time and during that phase the work-rate will inevitably slow down. Will it get quicker? Yes, in time and assuming adequate hardware - that means a minimum 166Mhz Pentium, 32 Mbytes of RAM with nothing else running, and ideally a 233Mhz processor. For therein lies the problem with voice recognition; the software is here, but the hardware is only just getting to the point where it is adequate for the task. But, if you have the right equipment, and you can't touch-type, then you might well ask yourself why you need a keyboard at all. In ten years time there is no doubt that voice recognition will be the natural way to input text into computers, and on the basis of the what I have seen so far, there is no doubt that Dragon systems will one of the dominant programs in the market.

by Dragon Systems (£149.00) www.dragonsystems.co.uk

Review from 'Progress' published by Nebs Management, October 1998