It's always been a cyberpunk's idea of heaven, forget the mouse and keyboard and bone up your vowels, it's time to drive your PC by voice alone.
I've been suffering a bit lately with a bit of repetitive strain injury because of overuse of the old push-me-pull-you mouse and so I finally decided to try out a copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking 4 to see if it manages to live up to the hype. A copy will run you a touch under 70 notes, but I got my copy as part of one of those freebie CD's you get on the front of monthly PC mags. It was a full version, and as the programs that come on the disks with PC Pro are normally pretty reliable, I decided to take the plunge.
You need to have a microphone to make the package work, but it's relatively easy to load up. It's recommended that you spend as much time as possible training Dragon by reading out passages to it so that it can get to grips with your vocal inflections and accent, and this is always a bit of a drag, although the text you get with Dragon is pretty interesting by itself, with excerpts from 2001, 3001 and Dogbert's Secret Book of Management. I did quite a bit from this latter text and it was all I could do to avoid laughing out loud (I'm actually exaggerating now, I mean you tell me how often you or anyone you know has ever actually laughed out loud at anything). Anyway decent text does make the time pass and you can space it out over a few days if you really struggle.
Anyway, after about 15 minutes or so of training your program, Dragon claim that your speech will be fairly accurately translated. It's claimed that Dragon is the most accurate speech recognition program on the market, and I have to say I was quite impressed. The more training you give the higher the accuracy and so I?ve been building up over a few days.
Dragon also allows you to use some of your own text that includes specialised vocabulary such as that you would use when writing reports or letters at work, but that's a bit of a pain, and I found it easier to just build up via reading out the suggested texts.
You can also train while you're on the job (so to speak) by correcting any words the program gets wrong as you go through, but things get a bit disjointed if you do that. Still, stick at it and Dragon genuinely will reward your efforts. The training as you go along is the most effective way to sort the program, but as I've said it can be a bit of a pain.
I was extremely satisfied with Dragon after I?d been using it for a while, although I would suggest to you that it's main use is in dictating text. You can use your voice to control programs (if you can get used to saying things like ''Click File Click Open'', although I did find that Microsoft XP Home Edition did object to allowing you to do anything down that route on both Word and Excel. Dragon's own word processing software did work under XP, though, so I knew it wasn't the mike or the program but an oddity on the Microsoft packages. It should work okay, but I got well sick and tired of screaming out ''Click File'' after a couple of minutes. ''Start Microsoft Word'' worked in opening the program alright, but try as I might I just couldn't get Word to accept any commands, which was a bit of a bummer. You can see how useful it would be to drive everything by voice alone, but it looks like it could take some time to get such things operating properly.
Having said all that, word processing by voice is a pretty decent tool, especially if you write a lot of documents like I do, so even that facility is a pretty neat option.
I found that in general terms, as long as you don't use too much jargon, don't rush ahead of your computer's processor too far and speak quite clearly, then Dragon Naturally Speaking is a pretty effective program. At times you feel that you might be able to work a bit quicker with the normal tools of the trade, but it's certainly an advantage when you're getting jabbing pains down your right arm to be able to say what you want rather than typing it.
It's going to be a few years, though, before the fantasies of Star Trek come close to being achieved in real life.
A couple of days after I got Dragon up and running I was able to use it to compose a recent review on The Hobbit (plug plug plug) and it came out pretty well, without too many corrections being needed.
Just to give you an idea of the quality, I thought I'd show you exactly how good Dragon is. The last few paragraphs are now repeated below, exactly as Dragon translated them from me reading them out.
I found that in general terms, as long to go use to which are going, don't rush ahead of your computers processor too far has been quite clearly, the Dragon NaturallySpeaking is pretty effective programme. At times you feel that you might be at a Word in a bit quicker with the normal tools of the trade, but it's certainly an advantage when you're getting jabbing pains down your right arm to be able to say what you want rather than typing it.
It's going to be a few years, though, before the fantasies of Star Trek come close to being achieved in real life.
A couple of days after I got Dragon up and running I was able to use it to compose a recent review on The Hobbit plug plug plug) and it came out pretty well, without too many corrections being needed.
Now, I hope you'll agree that that ain't too bad an attempt at all and it's relatively easy to go through it afterwards making the corrections you do need. Even easier, if you highlight the errored text, say ''Correct that'' and ''Train'' to get things exactly right. You'll soon get used to talking like a total moron, don't worry, although things are a bit odd at first.
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