Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal - Charles Darwin
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The FBI's technology just isn't good enough
WOULDN'T IT BE great if we could talk to our computers? And they understood us too?
The FBI clearly shares my enthusiasm on this issue, as will be revealed.
No more ridiculous IT terminology to learn. No more sitting at a keyboard, making our arses fatter, while our backs warp irretrievably out of shape.
Wouldn’t it be cool if your voice was the operating system?
That is the premise that voice recognition vendor Nuance was built on. Damnit, they say, humans were here first. Computers should blinking well learn our language, not the other way round.
OK, they’re an IT company, so their primary maxim is ‘give us your goddamn cash'. But I like the way they go about trying to take my cash.
So I was desperate for the new version of Dragon’s Naturally Speaking to work. This is the technology that used to be Voice Express, before Dragon bought the remnants of Lernout and Hauspie, and Nuance bought them.
The new version of the software is the tenth. So we’ve had nine false dawns already.
But, has it finally, ahem, come of age?
The INQ went to New York to find out. Vlad Sejnoha, Nuance’s chief scientist, gave us a demo.
There were some teething problems. I said “I’m sitting here with Vlad Sejnoha”, but his laptop translated this as “I’m sitting here with Al Qaeda”.
Which is a bit worrying. Because the FBI is a big user of this technology. I’m beginning to see how foreign policy mistakes are made. The system just needs to get used to my voice, I’m told.
Then Vlad drops a bombshell. While Naturally Speaking can recognise eight different US accents, it thinks there is only one British accent.
"Bloimey Mooray Poppuns," as language expert Dick Van Dyke once said. "Thoy thinks us fore-runners are all the soime!"
Anyway, I’m desperate for this software to work, so I’m going to give it a go. I’ll share the review results soon, if you’re interested.
Toodle Pip (as we British types say). µ
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As journalists, we have to be fairly cynical about stuff, so, yes, I probably did give them a hard time.

A lot of people tell me it works. I've never tried it myself, yet.

There was a dutch journalist on the same trip as me who swears by it.

What can I say?

I try to be honest!
You know windows XP comes with a (free) speech recognition (at least you can download the needed elements, or install unreal tournament or some other game that uses it to have it done for you), and vista has an included greatly enhanced (allegedly) speech recognition engine that is right there in control panel.
I thought that was why all those companies went under in the first place, lack of interest and 'free with windows' competition.
I've been using Dragon for four years now. I'm a translator, so I do a lot of typing (110K words/month). I was in pain with arm and finger tendons on fire. Tried Dragon out of desperation. It works so well it's the only reason why I still have one Windows box -- just to run Dragon.

The trick is that you need to speak *clearly*. Try a Beeb-style accent, or imagine you're talking to a secretary or child, or just don't chop syllables off words. Sloppy speaking is not an "accent". It's sloppy speaking. "Mooray" would stump most humans, come on.

And don't expect it to recognise "Vlad Sejnoha" or any other weirdly spelt names without training it first (takes minutes, my Dragon knows my surname, which throws most Brits). How many *humans* would know how to spell "Vlad Sejnoha"?

Voice recognition is not perfect, butt bee grate full four Watt it canned doo four yew.
Sorry, but dictating OS-commands will never take off.
And how exactly do you manage a roomful of programmers jabbering away in code, with two marketroids yakking to customers/wife/next conquest plus the secretary in the corner droning a mind-numbing report ?
I wonder what the PC in the middle of all that is going to understand and, more importantly, execute.
Not to mention what happens when the company loudmouth stops by and delivers his latest cognitive dissonance with a stentorian voice.
Or the company joker opening the door and yelling "REBOOT OKAY !".
Good Lord I much prefer a keyboard to that kind of mayhem.
"Computer! Tea, Earl Grey, hot!"

"Turbo boost now, buddy!"

"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that."
...

"All right! I finally killed the smeggin' toaster! I hate the smegger! Now the smegger's dead. Good riddance!"
if this can be used to run the whole computer then I think it's excellent.

"computer, internet, yahoo tv listings"

"computer, check email, tell me how many new messages, list who from and subject"

"Computer, open free openoffice Writer (free word clone) and type the following letter..."

"Computer, open Battlefield2 and log me in, find server with ping less than 130 and more than 25 players on a map with vehicles, punkbuster and same version as mine"

"Computer, drive my car with me sleeping in the back, wake me when we get there"

The Asus EEE has some Voice Command program, but all it does is open apps, at least that's all I got it to do. But by the time I had said "Computer Internet" it would have been quicker to click it myself.

Maybe the exercise we get while typing is saving us from being really fat, and if we go to the speaking computer route we will end up with fat stumps as arms?
I bought this for fun and it took to much time in the end. I was working up scripts to start programs using exploder, sigh. The guy had a better product that went for like 3k but then he vanished. Site is now Not Found, and the program is now Freeware. ahh the memories. 
I could say "eat that" and "eat that" would scroll in Quake2.
Wonder what happened to him, not even on Wikipedia.
I doubt anyone is going to stand up to talk to their computer, even if it does understand your voice. If anything, people will just lose the small amount of calorie burning their arms cause by typing, and become fatter and slouch even more.