RE: non-NB: voice recognition software

["Jim Wilbanks" <jimwilba@nospam.mindspring.com>]

I run a pentium III under win2000. Noticed that L&H Advanced voice dictation
works fine on NBWin SWS. The navigation stuff doesn't work but dictation
does.

-----Original Message-----
From: notabene@nospam.piper.hamline.edu [mailto:notabene@nospam.piper.hamline.edu]On
Behalf Of Enrique Lynch
Sent: Thursday, December 21, 2000 5:19 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list NOTABENE
Subject: RE: non-NB: voice recognition software


May I join those who are most interested in Joe's macros for Dragon
Dictate.

I bought Dragon some months ago but could not make it work
together with NBW. I noticed there was a way to make it run into
Word (it actually installs itself on Word's desktop) but it didn't work
anyway, at least with my machines. I remember Judy Evans, some time
ago a frequent contributor to our List, as a long time Dragon user, but
I don't know whether she actually used Dragon with NB or only for e-
mailing.

To my experience Dragon (and I suppose the same applies to all voice
recognition software) needs a very powerful machine (something like
Pentium III or alike) and a huge RAM to be reasonably effective. The
microphone is crucial too.

I worked with the standard version for a while (I hate typing and dream
of some humble and friendly and obedient Golem to work with) but
the results were dreadful. Obviously, my work involved philosophical
texts, not simple commercial memos. Dragon made all sort of
mistakes, looked like NBW first release or even worse. A text from
Mazzino Montinari on Nietzsche suddenly turn into something like a
Tex-Mex recipe.

Training Dragon is bothersome and takes an indefinite number of
hours, you have to read in loud voice a training text 140 pages long
(the manual says with the first 20 pages would be enough, but it is not
true). The training has to be completed with extreme care since every
single output from the user is registered as correct, that is, mapped to
some idiosincratical association by Dragon's engine. Therefore if you
dictate something about Plato's cave and the computer writes down
"Dave" instead of "cave" you have to stop and teach it to discriminate
between the D and the C, otherwise you will have "Dave" fiddling into
your work every time you turn Platonic. Now when some technical
text is concerned the "Dave/cave" problem happens almost on every
line of text. So in the end you can get really upset!

On the other hand, working on a AMD K6 Toshiba laptop with 96 MB
of RAM, Dragon hanged after the third page or so. I good advice is to
save both the dictated text and the vocal and user files every 10
minutes.

Anyway, I still want to have a look on Joe Kotva's macros.

All the best,





El 20 Dec 2000, a las 11:16, Joseph Kotva escribió:

> Cyprian,
>
> I do not want mislead, Dragon's select-and-say feature does not work inside
> a NB. [I tried the registry hack, but NB is not Windows compliant enough for
> select-and-say to work.]  However, Dragon does work well inside a NB in
> terms of straight dictation.  I have added some macros for use in editing in
> NB, calling up Orbis, calling ibidem, etc. The most useful macros I've added
> are for moving text back and forth between NB and Dragon's own word
> processor.
>
> Are you familiar with Dragon's global.dvc file?  If so, I could send you a
> copy of mine as an e-mailed attachment along with a crude list of the macros
> I've added.  If you are not familiar with the global.dvc, I will need to
> wait until mid-January to send to the macros broken down individually.  (I
> am extremely pressed for time right now.  I pastor a Mennonite church & I am
> running way behind on a significant academic presentation for January 6.)
>
> Joe Kotva

Dr. Enrique Lynch
Departamento de Historia de la Filosofía, Estética y Filosofía de la Cultura
Universidad de Barcelona