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...
