[NTLK] Speech recognition.

[Joel M. Sciamma]

Last week I started using Dragon Dictate for the Mac because it was on offer in a clearance sale and I was curious to see how this technology had moved on after all the disappointments of the past.

I was one of the founders to contribute a small amount to MacSpeech when they started up but until they adopted the Nuance engine there were still too many errors. With the current version, the speed and accuracy are completely unbelievable; it's like magic. I only had to perform a small amount of training, which was very simple and only lasted a few minutes, after which it recognised my speech effortlessly.

This makes me rethink how I use the iPad in the sense that instead of using handwriting recognition, I could easily write in an application such as Penultimate (which is like a sketchbook) and then simply speak my notes into the Mac in whatever application I want to use and it would be faster and more accurate than practically anything else. I could embellish and expand on the notes I had made with very little extra effort.

This kind of solution works very well for me because I work in a quiet environment, so it may not be for everyone. What it does show is that the introduction of technologies such as Siri will make the interactions we used to have with computers less and less frequent. The Newton led the way in translating the analogue world into the computer and now developments like these are pushing it further.

This message was created entirely with speech recognition.

Joel.