Wednesday 12 December 2007

Voice Dictation Ramblings

Does the voice dictation software worked with windows life writer?  It seems to, but with vista ultimate even though the voice dictation software seems to be more efficient in detecting words and some earlier versions of software I have used, it still gets into difficulty with commands.  Start straying into any vocabulary which contains command words which could be misunderstood, and you will immediately in difficulty.

The other nuisance is that it still seems to insist on interpreting punctuation in the American sense, so that for example if you say the word.  Sometimes you get a.  And sometimes you get the period if you see what I mean.  It seems easier sometimes just to use the American punctuation to avoid all that  difficulty.

Why is it also that the he seems to be only two pieces of text that can be used to train the computer to understand speech recognition better?  The old Dragon software I had even had the excerpts from Alice in Wonderland and other classic works which could keep you amused when you are dictating to the computer.  I sometimes think in the old versions of voice dictation software that the more you trained a computer by less accurate it became.  For this reason sometimes when things got really bad, I used to delete all of the training files and then found that the accuracy tended to improve.

There is no doubt that things had got a great deal better than the last 10 or 15 years. I remember seeing a friend of mine whose name was Ken Ashcroft trying out a very early version of Viavoice using a headset and a laptop.  He was the finance director of Amstrad at the time and got to play with pieces of software, new computers which will blindingly fast for example the 386 which wren had an amazing 20 MHZ, and of course the first Sky satellite dishes.  I had one of those before the Astra satellite even started transmitting.  It stood on a tripod, and I placed it on the balcony of my flat in Airlie Gardens.  When the satellite started operating test transmissions, I had somebody watch the television whilst I manipulated the dish up and down, sideways and around until I got the best possible picture.