Speech Recognition Software :: Essays Papers

Speech Recognition Software Wouldn't it be nice to talk normally to our computers, just as we've seen the characters in "Star Trek" do? Of course, the computers in "Star Trek" understand what you're saying, and that's still a long way off. Tecnology has been advancing at astonishing rates, developing new software for a better interaction computer – human. For example Dragon Systems' NaturallySpeaking is the first continuous-speech voice-recognition program designed for general dictation Until now, most voice-recognition programs supported discrete speech. Examples include Dragon Dictate, Kurzweil Voice, and IBM's Simply Speaking and VoiceType. These work well in special circumstances. But. You. Have. To. Speak. Like. This. Good enough IBM's soon-to-be-released Via Voice different is that they offer large-vocabulary, continuous-speech recognition. Their promise is that you can speak normally and the program will understand what you say. These programs are designed to replace dictation machines and give you hands-free typing. Seeing this In NaturallySpeaking, the app writes the words you speak, and you can save what you've spoken as an .RTF file or copy the material to the Clipboard and an application. You can even edit your text within that application by speaking specific phrases. Saying phrases like "select word" or "spell that" is cumbersome and more time-consuming than editing by hand, but it does allow hands-free use of the program. Ideally, it could be combined with a speech-synthesis program that would verbally prompt you for information. But the real breakthroughs are farther off, when the programs can better differentiate the context of what you are saying. Even then, that doesn't mean the computer will understand what you mean. That's just science fiction. But having it recognize words as you speak them is a big step forward. Dragon has added some new dictation and editing capabilities not found in its previous product, DragonDictate. You can spell words by saying the letters instead of using the alpha-bravo alphabet. Voice macros enable you to add long phrases to documents by speaking shorter ones. To aid postdictation editing, its new select-and-say feature highlights a word or phrase anywhere in the document if you say, "Select [word or phrase]." Typically, you'll have to edit your document after you dictate it; if you wish to edit your file orally, you have to learn the appropriate voice commands. Once you have installed the software it is important that you go through the speech training consisting on two parts. The first part, an informative dictation trainer, stepped me through both a basic and dictation training session.