#VIAVOICE MILLENNIUM EDITION PROFESSIONAL#

Patton's famous D-Day speech aloud, NaturallySpeaking changed all the flamboyant general's salty terms. If you're a fast typist, you're probably going to find it faster to let your fingers fly over the keyboard than to have to go back and fix one in 10 words.Although NaturallySpeaking is slightly better than ViaVoice, the next most accurate product in the review, it costs about $400 more.One feature that annoyed me was the automatic censoring of colorful language. NaturallySpeaking averaged 91 percent accuracy.Now, 91 percent is terrific but not quite good enough for everyday use. I found myself having to fix more and more words, sometimes one or two per sentence, though occasionally I could go for long stretches without touching the keyboard.Nonetheless, the recognition was the best I have ever experienced at the first level of training. But as I branched out to bigger'and interestingly, sometimes smaller'words, chinks appeared in Dragon's armor. The program dutifully recorded my speech on the screen. When I started testing NaturallySpeaking, I initially thought my keyboardless fantasy was coming true. Training consisted of reading snippets from one of nine book choices.The extra minutes of training did improve speech identification. It did, however, have the longest training time of the three products: 20 minutes to finish Level 1 basic training, more than twice as long as the fastest of the three, Voice Xpress. Extra training might have improved the results, but I assigned grades based on how well the products performed after basic training.Dragon NaturallySpeaking took up a scant 179M of storage, and its menus and choices were easy to comprehend. I tried them on a powerful Pentium III system with 128M of RAM, hoping it would minimize the training time.I completed each package's basic training and started processing speech as soon as the program said it was ready.

#VIAVOICE MILLENNIUM EDITION PROFESSIONAL#

Plus, the English language has lots of words that sound the same but have different meanings'such as red and read'or that are spelled differently based on context'such as to and too.It's amazing, really, that speech recognition has advanced as far as it has.I tested three products: Dragon Systems Inc.'s Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional 4.0, IBM's ViaVoice Millennium Edition Pro, and Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products USA Inc.'s Voice Xpress Professional.

This is complicated by the fact that no one pronounces a word exactly the same way every time. It has no social skills to fill in the blanks and must rely on interpreting the exact sounds. Even if a speaker does not specifically state something, the listener can often figure it out from the context.A computer listens in a context vacuum. Humans, especially when they communicate in person, have a whole set of background data to fall back on when they come to a gap in the conversation.

Instead I sat in front of the keyboard, typing away and slowly developing carpal tunnel syndrome.Although recognition technology has greatly improved in the past couple of years, it's still not good enough for everyday use.If you closely study how people communicate, you'll be surprised to learn how many holes in meaning are left open by speakers and interpolated by listeners. By John Breeden IIGCN StaffI had hoped to write this review of the leading speech recognition applications without ever touching finger to keyboard.How great it would have been to just kick back in my chair and transfer my thoughts effortlessly onto the screen.

Viavoice millennium edition