Dragon Systems NaturallySpeaking 4.0 Professional cont'd:

Dictation Into the NaturallySpeaking Applet

Dragon puts up its own window for dictation. Unlike the other products, it has no separate toolbar; all options and status settings are controlled from the main menu on this window. This has both pluses and minuses. On the plus side, it saves screen real estate devoted to a separate tool bar. On the minus side, it makes it hard to set options or change settings or access a history list when dictating into other programs.

There is a free floating recognition status box that is visible most of the time. The status box shows whether the dictation engine is listening, processing or confused. It is the best designed and most informative status box of all the products. Regrettably, the status box disappears during corrections, which makes debugging difficult when misrecognitions occur during the correction dialog itself.

There is only one level of undo, which is the problem when reworking consecutive misrecognition of correction commands. There is a history list of recently recognized phrases which is helpful when debugging those misrecognitions. The history list only records phrases and commands that happen when using Dragon's dictation window. That makes it more difficult to debug misrecognition errors that occur outside that context.

NaturallySpeaking's corrections command structure is relatively flexible, but there are occasional bumps. The "select" command can be used to locate misrecognized words prior to actual correction. However, this command would not always select the right phrase especially if the phrase consisted of only one word. For example, "select in" would sometimes find "an" instead of "in". "Select her" would sometimes find "are" instead of "her." This is annoying when there are multiple instances of both and you have to keep saying "select again" to skip over the incorrectly matched word.

When there are multiple occurrences of a phrase, "select" can be made to search forward or backward and to do so repeatedly until the precise instance of a phrase is located. The need to change direction becomes apparent on high resolution monitors where the displayed text size is large enough to contain multiple instances of the same phrase. Unfortunately, once you discover you are selecting in the wrong direction, there is no easy verbal way to change direction. You have to go to the menu and set the option and restart the selecting process.

Oddly, the "correct" command only searches backwards for the nearest match and cannot be made to skip over unwanted matches. As a result, some of our testers unhappily abandoned the use of the theoretically more efficient (lower muscle event count) "correct" command in favor of a more muscle event intensive but less frustrating sequence of "select" followed by "correct that."

The "select " feature only works within the viewable window, even if you know that text exists elsewhere in the document. By contrast, "select next paragraph" does work for paragraphs outside the window. The "Find" command in the menu bar will locate text outside the viewable window, but curiously does not respond to voice instruction.

Another annoyance some of our testers tripped over was inconsistencies in the "undo that" command. During the correction dialogue, a list of choices for alternate interpretations of the utterance is presented. Sometimes you inadvertently choose the wrong item from the list and don't recognize that until you see the item applied to the text. If you then say "undo that", re-select the word to be corrected and then call up the choice list again, the alternate choice list is no longer present. Dragon normally maintains a recording of your voice for dictated text. But in this case, your recorded voice for that phrase is also no longer present.

Dragon does have a way force the next phrase to be interpreted either as a command or as dictation. This is done by pressing special key sequences. Unfortunately, there's no way to do this verbally, rather than with key sequences, during dictation.

NaturallySpeaking is the only product we reviewed that lets you interrupt a translation of a long phrase which is threatening to become egregiously incorrect. This feature is especially important during transcription from the palm recorder.

Dragon worked well with the Telex M-60 microphone. It did need the microphone to be placed closer to the speaker than did IBM ViaVoice - 17 inches vs 21 inches - for the same level of accuracy.

More: Introduction
More: Ongoing Training Process...
You are here>: Dictation into the NS Applet...
More: Text to Speech Performance...
More: Integration With Other Applications...

 
 
Choose from menu...