Getting fired up about the Dragon

By CHRIS BARTON

This device is too good to be true. Walking back to the office after a press conference, a few ideas congregate in my brain.

Quick as a flash, I whip out my pocket-sized digital recorder and dictate a few sentences. That leads to a few more thoughts and a few more sentences. I'm on a roll. Why stop now?

I drop into a cafe, find a quiet table in the corner, order an espresso, scan my notes and dictate the rest of the article.

I'm just about finished when I realise there's an important point that's buried near the end.

Because this is a digital recorder I can press a few buttons to select the appropriate sentences, cut them, and then insert them near the top of my recording. The same goes for deleting and copying.

Back at the office, I attach the recorder to a wire connected to my PC and hit "transcribe." The PC whirrs away for a few seconds and then miraculously my story is on screen.

Impossible?

No, it's real - and a godsend for anyone suffering from the painful torture of keyboard occupational overuse syndrome, or for those who type at the pace of a snail.

The device and its speech recognition software is Mobile Organiser - one of the range of Dragon Naturally Speaking products.

The only snag is that my PC doesn't have the grunt necessary to work this magic. Speech recognition is a real resource hog - working best on a Pentium III or equivalent processor, 128Mb of memory and at least 300Mb of free disk space.

My PC does not come close on any of the above. In truth, the software will work okay on a Pentium II and with only 64Mb of Ram, but to do voice recognition properly the more power you have the better.

To see for myself, I visit Roadshow Entertainment, one of Dragon's distributors in New Zealand.

Their test machine is a fairly well appointed Pentium II. I train the software to understand my voice by reading to it using a headset microphone.

With more time I would also train it using the hand-held mobile recorder's microphone - noting that each time I do this I create a 50Mb speech recognition file of my voice.

There are several stories the software likes to have read - including Alice in Wonderland and something by Dave Barry.

I choose the latter, but quickly wish I hadn't because it's so difficult to read without cracking up. But I persevere and complete the task in six minutes.

At this point I could also feed the PC some of my vocabulary by letting it digest stored articles I have previously written.

In that process, it looks for the words which are not already in its 250,000 word dictionary.

Though it's clear that the more you train the software, the better it gets, I'm itching to see how it works after a six-minute lesson.

I try my first sentences: "Welcome to the world of continuous speech recognition. My name is Chris Barton."

Amazingly, Dragon gets everything right - except for my name which it believes is "crisp outing."

To correct the error, I simply teach the software the difference saying "crisp outing" and then "Chris Barton" - which are added to my speech file.

Even more amazingly, the software has no trouble understanding my commands such as paragraph, scratch that (delete), and select. I'm even able to instruct by voice to change the font and size of the text.

But that's not all. The Mobile Organiser - which costs $899 including software, headset and hand-held recorder - also interfaces with your e-mail and calendar software, enabling the dictation and sending of e-mail messages and the placing of appointments in your electronic diary.

All by voice - no keyboard required. I'm sold.

Now, how can I convince someone I need to upgrade my PC?