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Dragon Systems NaturallySpeaking 4.0 Professional cont'd:

Integration with Other Applications

What Happened to Help?

There is no easy way to find out which commands are acceptable to the engine in any given context. Although NaturallySpeaking once had a "what can I say" command just as the other products do, it no longer exists. The other products bring up a context-sensitive command display that show exactly which commands are applicable in the current context. Dragon's full set of commands are only available in selected programs such as its own dictation window or Microsoft Word. This lack of context sensitive help makes debugging command misrecognitions difficult. You have to consult the manual or the on line help to discover whether the thing you just said was not allowable or merely slightly mis-phrased.

The lack of text to speech facility in all but the Dragon dictation window was judged by some testers as a serious integration failure. They considered it a big loss especially for e-mail.

Under Instant Messenger there is no way to bring up the correction window, although the dictation engine clearly recognizes the "correct that" command. This makes many types of verbal corrections impossible leaving you to manual methods. The incoming and outgoing message alert sounds are inappropriately turned off. Similarly, it isn't possible to open the correction window in Dreamweaver. Dictating database queries to the English Wizard works, but the correction window can't be brought up to fix misrecognized words. Microsoft Outlook, a product Dragon claims to be integrated with, also does not appear to support the correction window during e-mail composition.

As mentioned earlier in this review, the history list of recent commands and phrases is not accessible when using other applications besides the Dragon dictation window. This lack makes debugging misrecognitions difficult.

Dragon does not necessarily certify that NaturallySpeaking will work identically, or even reliably, with every program that exists - nor do any of the other vendors. Their manual suggests that the user can dictate into the Dragon window and cut and paste to other applications. In view of the inroads other vendors have made integrating with other applications, we find this suggestion weak.

Macros Strongest of all Vendors

NaturallySpeaking handled the e-mail macro very well as long as we gave it the complete address list in advance. The macro could not detect when the Netscape mail program had finished loading, so we used a "wait 10 seconds" instruction to cover the worst case—but that workaround leaves you drumming your fingers if the program is already loaded.

Even though Dragon, like the other vendors, uses a wizard to build macros, it's the only vendor that provides the finished macros in an editable text format, useful for the developer who is building macros and periodically updating them for a large population. With the other vendors, macros can only be updated by personally running back through the wizards.

There is no simple way to copy and paste parts of one macro into another at the wizard level. Reuse of a macro inside of another macro is possible.

Transcription Usable

The program load time to change between direct dictation and transcription was almost two minutes on the slow machine - onerous for switching back and forth in the middle of a document.

Although we liked the light weight and lighted display of the Dragon palm recorder, we didn't like the fact that the unit's nine buttons handled over 30 transcription modes. Such a design requires you to remember whether to double or single click the buttons, and how fast and how long to do so. One of the manuals used tips, often as many as two per page, to aid in dealing with this button overload, but this made the manual's text less coherent.

On the slower, 233-MHz CPU, phrases are sometimes dropped during the transcription process, in addition to the usual misrecognition errors. While Dragon's minimum 200-MHz CPU specification might be good enough for straight dictation, it is not sufficient horsepower for transcription. Unfortunately, there's no warning on any of the products reviewed that some phrases are being dropped or that the CPU can't handle the overload. You're left to discover these lapses yourself by scanning through the transcribed text. Usually, the voice tracks recorded during the transcription process remain intact, which are helpful in piecing things back together.

Another transcription problem is that an editing command spoken into the palm recorder can be misrecognized as something horrendous like "delete previous paragraph," causing a whole paragraph to disappear in the transcribed text. This, again, is true for all the products reviewed. Dragon does provide a list of "safe commands" which can be used without visual feedback. Then, once transcription has been completed, you go back and interactively speak all the editing, formatting, or other commands.

Competent SDK

Dragon's NaturallySpeaking Developer Suite incorporates ActiveX components and COM interfaces for the Microsoft's SAPI 4.0. They have been tested with Microsoft Visual C++, Microsoft Visual Basic, and Borland Delphi. A vocabulary tool supports redistributable custom vocabulary development. The programmer's reference guide walks you through the different speech application building steps.

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


 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Page Last Updated: 02/23/00