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GCN Home > 09/15/08 issue

Straight talk: Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 delivers excellent speech recognition and vocal desktop control

Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 delivers excellent speech recognition and vocal desktop control

By John Breeden II

SPEECH-RECOGNITION programs and I have had a long and stormy history. When they first became commercially available, they promised to bring an end to keyboards and typing. Given that most people speak at 120 words per minute but only type at about 40 words per minute, the lure of more efficient offices with workers dictating letters, e-mail messages and memos three times faster than their keyboard-chained brothers and sisters was an attractive vision that many people sought to achieve.

Image: GCN
But that vision proved difficult to bring to life. Computers and processors were comparatively slow then, which resulted in exceedingly long training times for any speech-recognition program. Few people were willing to sit back and loudly read “Alice in Wonderland” for three or four hours to introduce their voices to their computers. And once the training was complete, the accuracy of the speech-recognition programs was far less than 100 percent, which meant that the time savings in dictation was often wasted by correcting mistakes using the keyboard.

After the release of the Pentium II processor, the training times for most speech-recognition programs dropped from more than three hours to half an hour or less. The accuracy rates also improved greatly, but few of the programs we tested in the GCN Lab were able to achieve more than 94 percent accuracy, and some hovered at less than 80 percent.

For one review I wrote, I dictated a speech by Gen. George Patton into all three of the programs on the market at the time and published what each of the programs typed. Even though I had completed the training process, the results were rather comical. The Washington Post picked up that review, and I had fun sitting in a café in downtown Washington watching readers try to guess the correct words to fill in the general’s speech.

Given my history, I was intrigued but wary when Nuance Communications contacted us with an offer to review Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 Professional. The software is just about the last man standing in the speech-recognition arena, having absorbed or outlived most of its competitors.

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