Dragon Naturally Speaking

Naturally Speaking can be very useful for publishing houses,

media companies, etc, where a lot of typing work is done. Instead of typing, you

can dictate your matter to the software, and it’ll convert it into text. You

can also use it to run your PC without using the keyboard or mouse, as it

understands most Windows commands.

A complete installation of Naturally Speaking takes up to 187

MB of hard disk space. You can choose from four different versions of English

during installation–US English, British English, English for the Indian

subcontinent or for South-East Asia. However, you can’t switch between

versions without reinstalling the package. Once installed, a wizard takes you

through getting the software ready for speech recognition. Here, it adjusts your

microphone’s sensitivity, does general training, etc.

Naturally Speaking can be used to take dictation as well as

voice commands from you. So, you can, for example, use it to open an application

like MS Word and dictate a letter to it; or open your e-mail program and reply

to an e-mail message.

The software must be trained for your voice for more

effective voice recognition. Plus, you must also learn the words needed to run

Windows without using a keyboard or mouse. The accompanying manual gives a list

of commands. Training the software to recognize your voice perfectly is a

half-an-hour’s job, where the software displays text on the screen that you

have to read out into the microphone. Once this is done, the software is ready

for action.

Speech recognition can be done in two ways. You can directly

dictate to it, or create a recording and have it converted to text later. The

software accepts WAV files recorded in PCM 11,025 16-bit mono format. The sound

recorder in Win 9x can record files in this format for you, or you could use the

sound recorder that comes with the program itself.

Naturally

Speaking has lots of options to process the data that you’re speaking on the

fly. For example, you can undo a spoken word by saying "Scratch that".

You can tell it to select a particular phrase and then delete it, etc. It also

has the ability to play back your speech on the interface itself, so that you

can correct it. It skips words that have been modified by keyboard, so that you

don’t have to correct them again.

Being a continuous speech recognition software, it can

recognize what you’re saying quite accurately, even if you talk at your normal

pace. Naturally Speaking has an extensive active vocabulary of more than 160,000

words, which contributes to its accuracy.

Naturally Speaking is compatible with Windows applications

like Word 97 and 2000, Access and Excel. You can also surf the Web with it,

using IE 4 and above. It didn’t work as accurately in this, particularly due

to the nature of Website names, for example, Yahoo.com, Nazara.com, etc.

Overall, it’s a very useful software.

Ankur Saxena



at PCQ Labs