The novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, was written in 1948 by a then very ill George Orwell. The novel has given us “Big Brother”, “Room 101”, “thoughtcrime”, and other frequently quoted names and ideas. One that hasn’t caught on is the speakwrite machine that Winston Smith and others use to enter text rather than typing. Although software that understands human speech is available, there seems a reluctance to use it. Nuance, the people who produce Dragon NaturallySpeaking, have recently addressed some of these ‘myths’.
The first myth they address is people saying: “I don’t like talking to myself”. Their response is to suggest that when voicemail was introduced, people used to comment that they disliked using the system. This was reflected in the brief messages they left. As they got more familiar with voicemail and more relaxed using it, they accepted it as a useful and natural extension to the phone service. This pattern of acceptance was also reflected with the emergence of mobile phones. In the early days, when used in a public or confined space like a train, the mobile user often spoke quietly and terminated the call promptly. Today, with the ubiquity of the mobile phone, users are more relaxed, and often chat at length – sometimes using a Bluetooth headset – with their conversation forming a natural part of our environment and surroundings. Similarly, with desktop speech, you’re not talking to yourself; you’re writing a report, story, invoice, or inventory list, booking a table, dictating a memo or a text. In short, you’re getting on with your daily life using the most natural interface available – your voice!
The second myth they address is: “Speech recognition doesn’t work with my accent”. They answer that by saying that regions are often distinguished by their local accents as much as by their geography. To allow for that, speech recognition is engineered to understand speech even delivered with a heavy regional accent. Desktop speech recognition offers users the option to select the accent type that most accurately matches their own to ensure consistent transcription accuracy when a user is speaking fluidly. Speech solutions from Nuance recognise and understand regional accents and its applications can be optimised for a particular region to improve their accuracy. It programmes its solutions to identify multiple pronunciations of certain words to improve understanding – for example, the Irish accent sometimes pronounces the word “three” as “tree”. Nuance currently recognises 52 different pronunciations of the word “Heathrow” for British Airways to cater for those whose first language isn’t English. Nuance also takes into account that languages and the meanings of words develop over time – while the word “cool” refers to a temperature, it is also a synonym for “yes” – the solutions need to be updated to accommodate the changes. This means the power of desktop speech recognition can be enjoyed across the country, both now and in the future.
Their third myth is from people saying: “I don’t feel comfortable with a headset on”. Nuance suggests that no-one likes to feel like they’re trapped at their desk, whether at home or work. Aesthetically, some people associate cables with clutter, a blight in an otherwise tidy environment. That’s why Dragon NaturallySpeaking and Dragon Dictate for Mac are available with a wireless headset. This helps users unleash their creativity because they can wander around the office, home, or garden and lose no time capturing the creative thoughts that have been encouraged by their mobility. Not being tethered to the PC also means that anyone who suffers discomfort from sitting too long, can stand or move around and exercise without interrupting what they were doing, or losing their chain of thought or ideas. To extend this convenience and flexibility further still, they even provide the option to use your iPhone or Android-based phone as an input device to Dragon.
The fourth myth is one about taking too long to correct. Nuance proudly tells us that Dragon has accuracy rates of up to 99%, which many first time users achieve close to after a brief training process. The longer you use Dragon, the more accurate it becomes, by learning how you speak and optimising its recognition to match your pronunciation. Therefore, you won’t be correcting as many errors compared to when typing. Simple commands like ‘scratch that’ or ‘forget that’, or correct a specified text, makes editing quick and easy for the few times you’ll need it. Furthermore, Dragon will also read a document out loud, to help you further ensure it reads just as you intended.
And the final myth they try to dispel is from people who say: “I tried it a long time ago and I don’t think I need it today”. Nuance responds to this by suggesting that how we live and work has changed, so there’s a greater need for the speed and convenience delivered by speech recognition. Whether multitasking at work or at home, we’re all trying to cram in more of the things we need to do. Dragon frees you up to do these and the things you want to do. It gives students more time to study and research because it takes away the erroneous task of writing lengthy pieces of study or coursework. Busy parents can create essential to-do or shopping lists quickly, leaving them with more family time. For senior users, it opens up a door to all the information, entertainment, and communication capabilities of the Internet-connected PC, without reliance on the keyboard. In the modern competitive workplace, where speed and information exchange are essential, it gives users a powerful way to stay ahead!
I’m not suggesting that you rush out and buy Nuance products for one moment – but we’re getting used to automated telephone systems that recognize what we’re saying, so it might be interesting to revisit using voice to input data to a computer, whether that’s just jotting down some notes as you think of them or writing a full-blown report.
Maybe George Orwell’s speakwrite machine will become more of a reality in 2014.
Showing posts with label Nuance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nuance. Show all posts
Sunday, 27 October 2013
Sunday, 17 February 2013
Review: Nuance PDF Converter Professional 8
As a regular and frequent user of Adobe Acrobat – the full version, not just the reader – I was intrigued to see whether anyone could come up with a product that was more useful or cheaper, so I welcomed the chance to have a look at the PC version of Nuance’s PDF Converter Professional 8.
It was easy to install and opened up a variety of PDFs that I had lying around. So that meant it was at least as good as the Adobe Reader! So next I had a look at some of the facilities and features it promised. In these days of cloud computing and document sharing, it offered that facility easily and fully. There’s a drop-down menu called ‘collaborate’ that calls up the Gaaiho Collaboration feature. When I installed, I included the Nuance Cloud Connector. I now have an ‘N:’ Nuance Cloud drive as one of my storage drive options. You can also save and open files on Dropbox.
The first thing I wanted to try was the ‘Advanced Edit option in the top row of the tool bar. This converts the PDF into a format that is editable. I changed the font and font size of text in a document. I was also able to insert whole paragraphs of text. I could even have added tables. I liked this feature.
It’s got quite a clever form-filling feature. You can download a form and start filling in the boxes. It’s even clever enough to tab to the next field. And it’s clever enough to convert an old PDF to a searchable PDF. And you can convert your PDF to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and WordPerfect documents.
Nuance also do Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice recognition software, and I hear they have something to do with Siri on iPhones, so they’ve included voice recognition in this software. It allows you to annotate your PDFs. Not sure whether I really need it, but it’s fun! And if you don’t want to speak, you can type into a resizable text box to make notes.
And like Acrobat, you can reduce file size and split the document. Tucked away on the left-hand side is the Pages tool. That gives you the option to add, replace, and delete pages – a feature I use quite often.
On the right-hand side is a pull-out menu that provides stamp options (you can make a stamp from any area of the PDF), security options, envelope and watermark options, as well as recovery and clip-art options.
Overall, it’s a clever and feature-rich piece of software. Considering its price compared to Adobe Acrobat and the extra facilities it offers, I think it is well worth taking a look at if you’re a regular (or plan to be a regular) user of PDFs.
It was easy to install and opened up a variety of PDFs that I had lying around. So that meant it was at least as good as the Adobe Reader! So next I had a look at some of the facilities and features it promised. In these days of cloud computing and document sharing, it offered that facility easily and fully. There’s a drop-down menu called ‘collaborate’ that calls up the Gaaiho Collaboration feature. When I installed, I included the Nuance Cloud Connector. I now have an ‘N:’ Nuance Cloud drive as one of my storage drive options. You can also save and open files on Dropbox.
The first thing I wanted to try was the ‘Advanced Edit option in the top row of the tool bar. This converts the PDF into a format that is editable. I changed the font and font size of text in a document. I was also able to insert whole paragraphs of text. I could even have added tables. I liked this feature.
It’s got quite a clever form-filling feature. You can download a form and start filling in the boxes. It’s even clever enough to tab to the next field. And it’s clever enough to convert an old PDF to a searchable PDF. And you can convert your PDF to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and WordPerfect documents.
Nuance also do Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice recognition software, and I hear they have something to do with Siri on iPhones, so they’ve included voice recognition in this software. It allows you to annotate your PDFs. Not sure whether I really need it, but it’s fun! And if you don’t want to speak, you can type into a resizable text box to make notes.
And like Acrobat, you can reduce file size and split the document. Tucked away on the left-hand side is the Pages tool. That gives you the option to add, replace, and delete pages – a feature I use quite often.
On the right-hand side is a pull-out menu that provides stamp options (you can make a stamp from any area of the PDF), security options, envelope and watermark options, as well as recovery and clip-art options.
Overall, it’s a clever and feature-rich piece of software. Considering its price compared to Adobe Acrobat and the extra facilities it offers, I think it is well worth taking a look at if you’re a regular (or plan to be a regular) user of PDFs.
Sunday, 26 August 2012
What can I say?
I’ve reviewed software that allows you to talk to your computer before. In fact I talked about Dragon NaturallySpeaking Version 9 in this blog back in January 2007. By then I’d gone from completely unimpressed to saying it’s worth a look. But I’ve just got my hands on Dragon NaturallySpeaking Version 12 from Nuance and I am very impressed!
I had to do a little bit of training in order for the software to recognize my voice and create my own personal profile – and that went fairly smoothly. But what was most impressive was the fact that it actually wrote what I said! In the past, I’ve played a game with my children where I’d say a few sentences, then they’d read what the software thought I’d said, and we’d repeat the process until gales of laughter overtook us reading the strange interpretations of our speech appearing on screen. But now my children are grown up, and so is this software. I found the accuracy of the product very good. I didn’t need to separate each word as I spoke – in fact, it recommended that I spoke in phrases. And it pretty much wrote on screen what I was saying.
The hard part for me was the controlling commands because I was unfamiliar with them, and to begin with I found myself wanting to just get my hands on the keyboard and make the correction quickly myself. To be fair, the people at Nuance understand this user frustration and they have put the Dragon Sidebar onscreen the whole time the software is in use. That makes it very easy to see the commands I need to use – for example saying: “delete ‘whatever’”, or “go to end of line”. I found that I was quite quickly remembering the commands that I used regularly and not needing to look them up. In addition, the software comes up with suggestions for what you might have said if you’re correcting and you can easily choose one of those alternatives. You simply say “correct ‘whatever’”, and then say “choose one” (or two or three – whichever is the better alternative).
As well as using the software with Word, it’s very easy to use it with Gmail, Hotmail, Facebook, and Twitter. You simply say: “post to Facebook” or “post to Twitter”. You can launch Word by saying: “Open Microsoft Word”. You can italicize, embolden, capitalize, insert lists, etc etc.
My version of the software came with a headset and microphone that I plugged into my laptop and which I used for most of this review. You can also download the Dragon Remote Microphone app for your phone. I used the Android version and there is a iPhone version. From the Profile menu, I selected “Add dictation source to current User Profile”. I selected “Dragon Remote Mic”. The laptop software then created a QR code that the software on my phone could scan. After that, I was connected. The only thing I needed to do was a little bit more voice recognition training. Once the training’s done, I can wander round my office talking to my phone and letting the words appear on my computer screen. As long as we’re on the same wifi network, it all works.
It’s very easy to tell the microphone to start listening and to stop – so that it doesn’t try to write down the whole of a telephone conversation that interrupts a session!
My conclusion this time is that the software is very easy to use and very accurate. It would make life very easy for someone who had problems using a keyboard and would not lead to the frustration experienced with much older voice recognition products. For able-bodied people, I think it makes a useful alternative input source, and the ability to walk around and talk – and then correct any errors later – makes it really useful for people, like me, who blog and write articles and often need to get a whole lot of ideas out of our heads onto paper (the screen) quickly.
Version 12 of Nuance’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking is definitely worth a 9 out of 10 score. And definitely worth seeing whether there’s a place for it in your organization or your home.
I had to do a little bit of training in order for the software to recognize my voice and create my own personal profile – and that went fairly smoothly. But what was most impressive was the fact that it actually wrote what I said! In the past, I’ve played a game with my children where I’d say a few sentences, then they’d read what the software thought I’d said, and we’d repeat the process until gales of laughter overtook us reading the strange interpretations of our speech appearing on screen. But now my children are grown up, and so is this software. I found the accuracy of the product very good. I didn’t need to separate each word as I spoke – in fact, it recommended that I spoke in phrases. And it pretty much wrote on screen what I was saying.
The hard part for me was the controlling commands because I was unfamiliar with them, and to begin with I found myself wanting to just get my hands on the keyboard and make the correction quickly myself. To be fair, the people at Nuance understand this user frustration and they have put the Dragon Sidebar onscreen the whole time the software is in use. That makes it very easy to see the commands I need to use – for example saying: “delete ‘whatever’”, or “go to end of line”. I found that I was quite quickly remembering the commands that I used regularly and not needing to look them up. In addition, the software comes up with suggestions for what you might have said if you’re correcting and you can easily choose one of those alternatives. You simply say “correct ‘whatever’”, and then say “choose one” (or two or three – whichever is the better alternative).
As well as using the software with Word, it’s very easy to use it with Gmail, Hotmail, Facebook, and Twitter. You simply say: “post to Facebook” or “post to Twitter”. You can launch Word by saying: “Open Microsoft Word”. You can italicize, embolden, capitalize, insert lists, etc etc.
My version of the software came with a headset and microphone that I plugged into my laptop and which I used for most of this review. You can also download the Dragon Remote Microphone app for your phone. I used the Android version and there is a iPhone version. From the Profile menu, I selected “Add dictation source to current User Profile”. I selected “Dragon Remote Mic”. The laptop software then created a QR code that the software on my phone could scan. After that, I was connected. The only thing I needed to do was a little bit more voice recognition training. Once the training’s done, I can wander round my office talking to my phone and letting the words appear on my computer screen. As long as we’re on the same wifi network, it all works.
It’s very easy to tell the microphone to start listening and to stop – so that it doesn’t try to write down the whole of a telephone conversation that interrupts a session!
My conclusion this time is that the software is very easy to use and very accurate. It would make life very easy for someone who had problems using a keyboard and would not lead to the frustration experienced with much older voice recognition products. For able-bodied people, I think it makes a useful alternative input source, and the ability to walk around and talk – and then correct any errors later – makes it really useful for people, like me, who blog and write articles and often need to get a whole lot of ideas out of our heads onto paper (the screen) quickly.
Version 12 of Nuance’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking is definitely worth a 9 out of 10 score. And definitely worth seeing whether there’s a place for it in your organization or your home.
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