Dragon fired up over speech recognition

By Adam Gifford

It is time machines conform to people instead of people having to conform to machines.

That's the message coming out of Dragon Systems, the Massachusetts company which makes Dragon Naturally Speaking software which allows your computer to recognise your voice.

"The average user has not had the opportunity to use speech recognition as they would and should," said Andreas Widmer, Dragon's vice-president for international sales, who has taken on responsibility for the Asia Pacific region.

"Users of computers are a special class of people, they're not afraid of technology, they're prepared to interface with a machine," Mr Widmer said.

"We are finding 25 per cent of people who buy our software then buy a computer to go with it. That points to our product talking to user groups who wouldn't use a PC if not for this sort of interface."

Mr Widmer said there had been an important shift this year.

"We are now getting products which not only hear what you are saying, they understand what you are saying. That shifts the entire paradigm of how you use a computer. The effect will be greater than the internet on the IT industry."

Dragon's latest release, Naturally Speaking Version 4, includes a 250,000 word vocabulary, 160,000 of which sit in memory, contributing to increased accuracy.

Mr Widmer said users can dictate continuously, naturally and accurately at up to 160 words a minute.

The training time for the system has been cut from an 18-minute routine which took up to 40 minutes to complete, to a three to five minute script which can be done in less than 10 minutes.

Documents can be fed into the system to teach it about the user's writing style and commonly used words.

There are voice interfaces to Microsoft Internet Explorer to speech-enable internet navigation or participation in chat rooms.

The entry level product, Dragon Naturally Speaking Essentials, costs about $179.

Dragon Naturally Speaking Preferred, which includes features designed for business and users and Dragon Naturally Mobile features for transcription of recorded speech dictated into a handheld recorder, dictation playback so the user can hear what they just said, and text-to-speech which allows the computer to read text aloud, costs $499.00.

The Professional version which contains the full vocabulary, sophisticated customisation features and allows for complete hands-free operation of a PC, has a list price of $1695.

Dragon recently released a $195 USB (Universal Serial Bus) microphone and sound-input system that bypasses the computer's existing sound card to reproduce high-quality speech direct to the software.

There is also a $799 recorder which can store up to 40 minutes of speech, or a further 80 minutes on flash ROM cards. The recordings can be downloaded to a PC using a serial link.