Dragon is Newton's antithesis
AT THE UK LAUNCH of the latest version of Dragon Naturallyspeaking, v 10, Nuance really did make it look like PC users could throw away their keyboards and control the PC completely by voice.
The Press demonstration struck this INQ hack as being the complete opposite to the launch of the Apple Newton.
On that occasion, Apple was promising a revolution with a PDA that could be completely controlled via handwriting recognition. Except it didn't work and the Newton insisted on recognising the word 'house' as 'horse'.
At the London launch, Naturallyspeaking made almost no mistakes and worked perfectly.
A couple of things became obvious, however. The more powerful the processor and the higher the amount of installed RAM (2GB is best), the better and faster the product will work.
Incidentally, for Cupertino fanboys it is actually possible to run this on a Mac infected with Windows in Boot Camp mode.
As you'd expect, version 10 is much faster than the previous offering (v9) by as much as 20 per cent. However, the most important new feature is Dragon Voice Shortcuts.
These shortcuts enable users to automate common multi-step tasks. Nuance's Simon Howard showed Dragon searching Google, Ebay and even Youtube. It was also pretty fast at doing a local search, too.
There's also support for Bluetooth headsets which will make Dragon more attractive to entry-level users. The cheapest copy of Naturallyspeaking 10 is £80 but prices rise to £645.
Obviously some professions will benefit more than most from going over to voice recognition – lawyers being an obvious target. Nuance itself markets a special edition aimed at medical staff.
For those intending to utilise Dragon mostly for dictation and sending emails, it is also obvious that the more you personalise the dictionary, the more accurate the voice recognition.
The pain with products like Dragon is that it normally takes ages to train the system to recognise your voice. Simon Howard proved that this is no longer the case with Naturallyspeaking v 10 by setting up a completely new profile and taking not much longer than a couple of minutes to 'train' the product.
Indeed most of the setup time involves the software checking the audio quality of whatever headset you're using.
Sadly Nuance had intended to give its audience a taster of software it is intending to offer for the Apple Ithingey which does voice searching even better than it can now.
However, the Wi-fi connection wouldn't work and the company had to skip the demo.
While it would be technically possible to build a keyboard-less PC using Naturallyspeaking, nobody's going to do it quite yet. But for anybody who's currently using other forms of dictation, Naturallyspeaking v10 is a killer app. µ
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working in the office where everybody has this software? It would be a nightmare! :)
Will it work in inside games?

Is there a video demo of it?
Unfortunately there's still one fundamental flaw with the whole approach, namely:

A good typist can type a lot faster than they could possibly speak.
right and the other issue, is multi input... you can do a lot with a keyboard and a mouse vs only talking, i really dont see this being the next big thing or replacement.
"A good typist can type a lot faster than they could possibly speak." Ummmm.... no. Take a look at

http://www.nuance.com/talk/

look at the video demo on the screen, and try the typing test. I can get up to about 100 wpm and still can't beat the damn thing.
How long does it take you to say for (int n=100;n>=0;n--) for (i=c[n]-1;i>=0;i--) because it only took me 5 seconds to type it.

Speech isn't good for everything; keyboard is king for programming.
Interesting comments above. I have to say that I managed to write a 500 page book in 6 months - which would have been simply impossible without the software (even at my steady old 45 wpm). The point surely is that you use both a keyboard AND voice recognition - I certainly do. I mean no-one said "laser mouse - its no good, it takes ages to type with that thing" - and its certain that a keyboard can be used to move a cursor - but its not as deft as a mouse. Equally, I of course accept that DNS 10 is not the best way of writing computer code, but neither is a secretary. Horses for Courses. It blasts out text at a hell of a lick, gets it right most of the time, doesn't get tired, or sick or demand a lunch break or a payrise, and this software costs about £100 - i.e. the equivalent of paying someone for about 1 days work. For getting chunks of very acceptably accurate text on a page, a combination of keyboard and mouse and talking is a massive improvement on where we were before.