Speech Recognition

[Stephen Katz]

Is Alpha Five v 4.5 compatible with any speech recognition program? It would sure make the day go faster for this dyslexic, two finger typist, to dictate the field information into my database.

[Jeff Moses]

RE: Speech Recognition

Stephen, If your speech recognition program is resident you should be able to use it with any program including A5.
Jeff

[Stephen Katz]

RE: Speech Recognition

Jeff,

Thank you for the response. I have IBM Via Voice, personal edition. I tried it with 4.5 but nothing happened. Is there something that needs to be configureed?

Thanks

Steve

[John Hertzler]

RE: Speech Recognition

Speech recognition gobbles horsepower. With a 700 Hz Pentium and 128 meg, Dragon is intolerably slow but does work. I would suspect that this might work with the new Gega processors and much ram.

[Stephen Katz]

RE: Speech Recognition

John,

Thank your for your response. I went to the Dragon web site. I could not find Alpha 5 on their compatibility list. Is there a special version I should see?

Thanks

Steve

[John Hertzler]

RE: Speech Recognition

Stephen,

I'm not surprised that Dragon has not tested Alpha 5 for compatibility. I would suspect that they only routinely address the mainstream products.

I'm using Dragon Naturally Speaking 5. It can transcribe information into Alpha 5, but it does so very slowly and would not be acceptable for everyday usage. I'm using a 700 Pentium with 128 meg of memory. You would not find the performance acceptable for filling in database information.

It is my understanding that speech recognition programs are memory and speed sensitive. I spend considerable time writing reports and do make use of the speech recognition software. In order to get it to understand my dictation, many hours of additional training were necessary to minimize errors. While the software does a surprising job of recognizing dictation with limited training, productive use requires extensive ongoing effort.

I would suspect that Alpha 5 competes with available memory and is part of the reason for the slow transcription. I've been curious as to the effect that additional memory would have been speeding up the application. With memory costs so low, I have been tempted to give it a try but have not had the time to add additional memory. My database applications center around people's names, addresses etc. Speech recognition software really doesn't work well for these applications, since it cannot differentiate spelling of common names - ie Lindsay and Lindsey.

Bottom-line, speech recognition software has come a long way over the past few years and is now marginally acceptable for dictation but as a long way to go before it becomes prime time.

If you follow the computer industry, everyone's looking for the killer application that will drive users to the new super processors. Right now games, video and graphics benefit most from these high-speed processors. Spreadsheets, word processing and databases generally run fine with exiting CPU. If this additional speed can take speech recognition to the next level, manufacturers may have the killer application that are looking for. Right now this is not the case.

I would say that we are still a few years away from what you are looking for, but I'm interested in hearing if anyone else has had a more positive experience in using a speech recognition program successfully.

[Stephen Katz]

RE: Speech Recognition

John,

Take you for your insightful response. I too have a 750/120 meg Pentium III. I noticed something interesting in using Alpha 5. My son (the molecular biologist) was playing around with my computer and turned on all the sensors on Norton utilities. I noticed that when I went into Alpha 5 the CPU usage sensor indicated that Alpha 5 was using 100 percent of the CPU. I asked Alpha 5 about this but they did have an answer. Has anyone else noticed this condition?

Regarding speech recognition and names, ViaVoice does have a spelling mode, which is useful.

Regarding Dragon, which version, or will all work, with Alpha 5? Does dragon have a spelling mode? Even if it is slow and Alpha 5 it might be faster than this two finger typist.

Thanks again for your comments.

Steve

PS this was dictated with ViaVoice

[csda1]

RE: Speech Recognition

John,

Memory and CPU speed are both critical to speech recognition. If you are limited in memory, then hard drive speed is also important. Alot of memory would be the greatest benefit here. (256Megs or 384Megs I believe would be great. More never hurts, but there are diminishing returns at some point. The cost of memory has never been cheaper!)

Alpha 5 needs a fair amount of memory (but not nearly as much as speech recognition) and fast hard drives.

Put those both together and it means you should have a lot of memory. As much as is reasonable for you.

There is one other thing that everyone can do to speed up their systems. This is a no-cost, no-risk thing to speed up the hard disk on some (actually most) systems.

1. Go to the Control Panel.
2. Start "System" icon
3. Go to it's Device Manager Tab
4. expand the Disk Drives item
5. For each hard disk (and for CDROM and other non-floppy drives too) select properties.
6. Under properties, choose the Settings tab and check off the DMA checkbox if available. Ignore the stupid Windows warning it will make. This was put in there for really bad clone motherboards that just don't exist
7. Reboot the system, then check the properties and see if the DMA is still checked. If it is (and previously wasn't), you should see a real speed increase as well as CPU utilization go down tremendously.

Windows almost always defaults with the DMA box not checked off, so invariably, most systems are setup wrong.

Finally, send me $20 for making your computer work so fast!!!! (Just Kidding!!)

{:?)

Regards,

Ira J. Perlow
Computer Systems Design & Associates
[email protected]