January 21 - January 28

NaturallySpeaking Preferred Edition 4.0 by Alessandro Cancian Interacting verbally with my computer is something that really tickles my fancy. I recently had the opportunity to try the latest version of one of the best selling voice recognition programs, NaturallySpeaking Preferred Edition 4.0 from Dragon Systems. The installation of this new program presented no problems, and thanks to the New User Wizard and the reference manuals, the creation of a new user profile was extremely simple. The software is able to manage multiple users, every one of whom needs to create his own profile and train the computer to recognize his voice. Training the computer takes only a little time spent reading some paragraphs that the computer itself will propose to you. The duration will depend from the type of computer: the version I tried was for Windows 95-98-NT machines, requiring 48 MB (Win 95-98) or 64 MB (Win NT) RAM, and 200 MB disk space, an audio card supporting 16-bit recording and at least a 200 MHz processor. This is of course the minimum configuration, and performance does not raise any enthusiasm. The use of more powerful computers dramatically improves this performance. The tests I ran on two different machines, one with a 266 MHz processor, the other with a 500 MHz chip, showed that very clearly. Voice recognition was very accurate, even in spite of my less-than-British accent. NaturallySpeaking allows interaction with many programs, such as Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.), Corel Word Perfect, America Online or Microsoft Internet Explorer to surf comfortably the Web. This is where I had some difficulty making NaturallySpeaking understand my vocal commands. NaturallySpeaking is a very intuitive and easy to use program, and it even supports some shortcuts (such as "cap" for "capitalize") that help cut dictation time. Lets hope that the next release will expand the number of shortcuts, since they are of great help. Dictating, correcting or replacing text gets very easy after a little practice, and since your hands are never required to operate the program (thanks also to a microphone supplied with the software), the only manual operation is launching the program. NaturallySpeaking is a very good product, even though its hardware requirements are a trifle too high. It sells for US$199, also too much in my opinion, although the product is very accurate. To get more info, visit http://www.dragonsystems.com

 

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