> I heard an NPR report recently about speech recognition products (for
> PCs), including a description of "Naturally Speaking" from Dragon
> Systems (also see http://www.palmettopages.com/dragon/pcproducts.html).
> It does continuous speech recognition, meaning that you can talk like
> this instead of like. This. With. Pauses. Between. Every. Word.
Supposedly there is something called Power SecrataryTalk or something
(everything Apple is "talk" very confusing) that retails for $695 that lets
you talk and it just types away.
As far as my use I just talk normally. granted I'm just saying simple two
or three word phrases but I'm not changing any speech patterns. Ok, so I
can't talk with my mouth full, but other than that....
>
> The guy from Dragon Systems claimed that their program takes dictation
> faster than any typist they've found. If true, then I could actually see
> myself giving up my keyboard. (I think for some reason I've always just
> assumed that typing would be faster than speech recognition.)
A writer for MacWorld is paralyzed and has used the above for two years to
write his column.
>
> So Apple's discrete speech recognition is cool, but their technology may
> not be competitive enough to compete as a stand-alone product. The
> question then is, does it work well enough to use as a standard feature
> to help sell Macs? Or will the additional support cost outweigh the
> marketing value? Support cost (answering phone calls) is really
> expensive, and can be a big determining factor on whether a feature
> makes it into the product or not...
Dunno. I would think that having someone thinking about buying a computer
and just saying,
Internet,
Mail,
Netscape,
etc. would make a pretty good demo for the 97%
Personally I think they should take it cross platform, however your right,
having to support all those IRQ errors with microphones etc. would probably
break Apple. :-)
Tim
-
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