LAW OFFICE COMPUTING
July 2003
Winton Woods
Usable Voice Recognition Technology Arrives
Five years ago at the State Bar Convention we demonstrated
a voice recognition system that had been used by one of my former partners for
about a year. He demonstrated the way that voice commands could be used to
control a computer system and do simple dictation. The dictation module left a
lot to be desired but, all in all, it was an impressive demonstration that
indicated a future for broader voice recognition technology. Until Dragon
Systems brought NaturallySpeaking to market a few years ago, actual functional
voice recognition technology was an elusive dream. With introduction of the
voice recognition system built into Windows XP dictating to your computer has
become quite easy. All it takes is a bit of time to train the system to
understand your voice.
You may have noticed that when you call Telephone
Information in various major cities you are first plugged into a voice
recognition system. If the computer can recognize the name of the person you
are trying to contact the system works reasonably well. If the system does not
recognize the name, however, it becomes difficult to deal with. That is caused
in part by the difficulty of understanding words in different accents and tones
of voice. The vocabulary necessary to run a telephone directory system,
however, is relatively small and the computer is able to guess at the name and
get it right a good part of the time. That is not so when you are dictating
sentences using a vocabulary of 30,000 or more words. Here the complexity is
enormously multiplied and the possibility for error is extremely high. Two of
the most popular ways of dealing with that problem made voice recognition
difficult and unpleasant in the context of dictation. The first was the
necessity to use what is called "discrete" speech and the second is
the necessity to train the system to recognize your voice. Discrete speech is
the careful enunciation of each word in a staccato style. It is easy to do for a
short period of time but once you get involved in dictation and you are
starting to think about what you are saying it becomes harder and harder to do.
And, as a result, the error rate increases dramatically. One way of dealing
with that error rate poses the second major problem that the older voice
recognition systems had. If you talk long enough to a computer and you
constantly tell it when it makes a mistake it will eventually build a pretty
reasonable capability for recognizing your voice. The problem is that this
training may take many hours or days and is incredibly boring. Even then the
number of errors in the older systems was so high that there was no real time
saving. Of course, people with disabilities or severely challenged typing were
willing to put up with that. The vast majority of people, however, required a
much more comfortable and natural system and that is what Dragon systems has
produced. NaturallySpeaking is very easy to use, does not require discrete
speech and does not require extensive "training" in order to
recognize your voice. I installed the program on my computer in just a few
minutes. It took about 20 minutes to do the initial training so that within a
half an hour, I was dictating comfortably and with high accuracy to my computer
screen. The Dragon NaturallySpeaking
system, comes with a high-quality microphone and the software program installed
on a CD-ROM. You can buy the Dragon software bundled with WordPerfect Office
2000 for about $50. I have found that version bundled with WP Office 2000
actually works better than the system you might buy at a computer store for a
lot more. And, don’t even think about buying the new Naturally Speaking Legal
Version which sells for $750-1000, as does the Medical version! What ever bells
and whistles those versions may have it is not worth price. I actually think
they are trying to rip off folks who
they believe, incorrectly, will not be put off by the price.
The new MS Office XP Professional has a built-in voice
recognition system that works in the same way under Word XP. I had a similar
experience with Word XP and in fact that is now my system of choice. It will
not work as well as Naturally Speaking straight out of the box but I have found
that if you devote a few hours to training it for your voice it is really very
good.
I have noticed some interesting aspects of use of the voice
recognition systems. I have always been a pretty good user of the dictating
machine -- able to produce sensible prose in rough draft form pretty quickly.
But my dictating sufferers from my deteriorating memory and I often cannot
remember what I said several paragraphs before. I am often not at all sure that
I included a particular point that I wanted to make and so sometimes my
dictating is fairly scrambled and repetitive. Being able to dictate to the
computer and see the text come up on the screen really overcomes that problem.
It is easy to read what you have written and to move comfortably into the next
topic. If you are one of those people, as am I, who laborers mightily over word
choice and style, dictating directly to the computer is a gift from heaven.
The future of voice recognition is very bright. Imagine, if
you will, a system that translates English into a different language. That
dream seemed beyond reach only a few years ago. It is now certain to be reality
in the not far distant future. The IT revolution is just begining, folks!!
PS: I made an error in the column on remote filing.
WordPerfect will produce Adobe Acrobat Portable Document files without any
extra software. I said that Word XP would do the same and I was wrong. In order
for Word to produce a .pdf file it needs additional software such as PDF995
which is free over the Internet. ( http://www.pdf995.com/).
Other more robust programs are available (http://www.win2pdf.com/)
at reasonable prices.