Friday, March 23, 2007

Talking to Yourself: Your Voice is Your Assistant

After sharing dinner discussing about blogging yesterday with Jim Calloway, I attend his presentation with Laura Calloway on Voice Recognition.

As he first stated: for anyone who has tried speech recognition before the summer of 2006, you never tried VR! I have to agree that before that I had tried it but had reached unsatisfactory results. Since Dragon Naturally speaking 9 is put on the market, it is a new story! I use it everyday and could not work without it!

It seems Vista has an included VR software. My experience (and Laura's) with XP'S VR was bad: I had to dictate all words apart...

Overview quotes:
It is less tiring than typing.
Even the best typist can't type as fast as he speaks.
A VR software is like a new employee: take the time to teach it how you work.
Aptitude with thechnology is a plus (I would add that it is not required though).

Issues:
Laura started with 512Mb of RAM but was only using Word when dictating.
I think you need at least 1Gb (preferrably 2) of RAM, especially if you use many apps at once. I normally have Hummingbird DM, Outlook, Word, IE, Adobe, PC Client VOIP,etc. opened all at once.

If I may add the best tip you've ever received: backup your profile!! I once spent about 2 months teaching Dragon to perfection and, don't ask me how, I lost my profile with all my customized dictionnary... (It seems that this tip was given by Laura when I left the room for a conference call)

Unfortunately, I missed about 15 minutes of this excellent presentation to take a phone call.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dominic,

As-tu essayé une version française du logiciel?

Anonymous said...

Dominic,

Très bons les nouveaux post sur le ABA Techshow. J'ai pas encore fini de faire le tour des trucs dont tu as parlé ici et des nouveaux liens sur ton Delicious.

Je me demandais en passant si le logiciel Dragon Naturally Speaking fonctionnait aussi bien en français.

Merci!

Dominic Jaar said...

La version francaise coûte le même prix que la version anglaise mais inclut les deux... Elle fonctionne aussi très bien avec un peu d'apprentissage.

Anonymous said...

Merci!

Désolé pour le double-post...

Blogger rend pas ça super évident de savoir si le message a été envoyé ou non et un léger manque d'attention m'a fait croire que mon premier envoi n'avait pas fonctionné.

Dominic Jaar said...

Y pas de mal. En fait, c'est parce que j'ai activé la modération des commentaires qu'il y a un délai. Je reçois du spam en quantité astronomique! Éventuellement, les francophones adopteront la formule blog et délaisserons les courriels (j'en reçois une dizine par jour à propos de mes billets...): j'ai hâte de recevoir plus de commentaires que de spams...