Dragon Naturally Speaking gets close(r) to perfection

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Supplier: Scansoft
Price: Preferred Version (reviewed) $199. Standard Edition $99
Web: SCANSOFT
Description: Voice recognition software
Requirements: Pentium III or above, 256MB RAM, 500MB hard drive, Windows, CD drive, sound card

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THE LAST TIME I looked at speech recognition software I was far from impressed. This was a Lernout & Hauspie package which hogged a heap of disk space, was slow as a snail, and didn't recognise nearly enough words to be useful. It was, in fact, plain annoying, and I said so at the time.

Lernout & Hauspie had acquired Dragon before it found itself a corpse like the many corpses from World War I that its headquarters in the Ypres Flanders Science Valley, were built on. Following that debacle, Scansoft picked up the bits of the software portfolio from L&H that it found useful, and Dragon Naturally Speaking is one of those results.

My earlier experiences with L&H software had biased me against the whole idea of the software, so this time round I decided to try a different tack and let someone totally unfamiliar with keyboards and computers have a bash.

The software comes with a headset which includes a microphone and earphone, and integrates with Windows software. Amongst its features is a dictionary of 300,000 words, and the ability to surf the web using voice, and use other voice commands to control a computer. I watched the ability of a first time computer user to come to terms with the software.

The software was installed on a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 machine with 512MB of memory. I'd recommend a high powered machine rather than the minimum specs on the box.

After the software is installed, the person using it needs to "train" her or his voice. A few years ago, this training process could be very long and arduous, but Dragon Naturally Speaking 8 gives you a choice of some very short texts to train your voice.

When it's installed, a bar appears at the top of the Windows screen, which allows you to turn the microphone off and on, and even lets the software read out what you've dictated.

After the person using it had spent a few minutes on this, she opened a word processor and read a three page A4 document.

Watching this process, I really was rather impressed at the accuracy the software achieved. Speaking in her ordinary conversational voice, the only problems that occurred was when she spoke too deliberately or too slowly. It also had a problem with words probably rarely used in everyday life. But when these kinds of problems happened the word processor flagged up grammatical and spelling errors.

As well as dictating into a word processor, the Dragon software also allows you to manipulate software, so you can select, delete, and perform most of the operations that otherwise would require the ability to use a computer keyboard. As the INQ guinea pig had no keyboard skills whatever, she found this a very useful feature.

I have to say that as an observer I was very favourably impressed with the performance of Dragon Naturally Speaking 8. It claims 99 per cent accuracy on voice recognition, delivering a speech to page speed of 160 words a minute, and I'd say that's probably a fair figure. The things that might cause me embarrassment - speaking to a PC, hey no way - didn't cause my guinea pig any problems at all. As she'd hardly touched a computer before, most of her problems came from navigating on the screen with a mouse, and on the rare occasions she needed to touch the keyboard.

The software comes with a comprehensive manual, online help that in my opinion could do with a complete re-write, and the headset mentioned. Based on my observation of its use, I'm giving this 9/10 on the INQ review scale. Very highly recommended. µ

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