[NTLK] Speech recognition.

[Joel M. Sciamma]

Forrest and Christian,

It's not about replacing HWR with speech or trying to shoehorn any of these technologies into being a single solution but instead it's about giving you options depending on the task and the context.

Speech recognition (SR) is all about speed and volume. If you had to create a text document of several letter-size pages, HWR would not be your first choice, you would reach for a keyboard, no matter what the device. Now with SR, you would speak it instead because it's a lot faster again.

Given that my HWR performance was consistently pretty good on the Newt and that I type reasonably fast and accurately, I would say that SR is about 3x faster than my typing. It's also a lot less effort. Interestingly, because you are not busy tapping away, you think about what you are about to say in a different headspace, and that can be a usefully productive experience.

On a device with a small physical screen, HWR is a brilliant and rather elegant solution and it's a pity that such a thing is not really an option on a smartphone today. On a device like the iPad, the screen real estate allows for a decent keyboard and that is a fast and practical solution for that device. On the Mac, with its serious horsepower and requirements for lots of text, SR is a fantastic additional tool.

Joel.