Anyone who spends any time using a PC will inevitably end up talking to it, so it’s only natural that software should exist to put such utterances to good use. This is the realm of speech recognition software and it’s one in which Nuance has been plugging away for many years. Its latest release for Windows is Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.5 and although this edition is being sold as a boxed standalone product, it’s also a free update for users of last year’s version 11.
Despite what you may have seen in the movies, speech recognition has yet to reach the stage where computers can actually understand what someone is saying and act accordingly. Instead, such software relies upon matching parts of speech to information stored in a database and displaying the corresponding words on screen. The number-crunching required to transcribe what someone has just said in reasonable time is considerable, but the prodigious amounts of processing power offered by today’s PCs makes it not only possible, but also eminently practical.
The leaps and bounds by which modern speech recognition software has progressed is most noticeable when setting up Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.5. For best results, the software needs to be trained to recognise a particular individual’s speech patterns. In the early days of the application, this meant reading aloud into a microphone for the better part of an hour to achieve somewhat mediocre recognition accuracy. Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.5, on the other hand, takes just five minutes to get a good ear for the way you speak and we dictated this review immediately afterwards with only a few mid-dictation edits.
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| Importing documents is a good way to bump up Dragon's specialist vocabulary |
Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.5 can be trained further to improve its already impressive accuracy (and can also import documents to add specialist terminology to its vocabulary), but unless recognition is way off, simply correcting misrecognised words as they occur is an easier way to fine-tune performance. This is simply a matter of saying “correct” followed by the errant word or phrase and, if there’s more than one occurrence, each match is highlighted with a number that can then be chosen verbally. A numbered list of other words then pops up and you just choose the correct one by saying its number, saying the word again or spelling it letter-by-letter if all else fails. The system works well, as do the other commands for navigating around and editing text, although this latter option does require the use of a specific vocabulary. Thankfully, a context-sensitive Desktop sidebar shows a list of available commands for when you’re stuck for what to say, but most are obvious enough to remember after seeing them once.
Although Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.5 works with any application that would otherwise rely upon a keyboard for input, dictation is a skill that takes time to master. Speaking a sentence that makes perfect sense is no mean feat and pausing while you gather your thoughts can interfere with the contextual analysis techniques the software uses to help identify words. The need to speak punctuation marks also takes practice, but this update does help by streamlining certain grammatical commands. “Bracket that” puts the last-spoken phrase in brackets, for example, which is easier than the older method of saying “open bracket” and “close bracket” before and after the appropriate text.
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| Mid-dictation corrections are all done with voice commands |
Transcription isn’t Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.5’s only purpose - it can also be used for general PC control. Commands for launching applications and performing common tasks are built in — “launch Internet Explorer” works as you would expect, for example, as does “search the web for…”. This version also adds built-in support for IE9’s new way of doing certain things, along with the ability to post messages to Twitter and Facebook using the appropriate commands.
If speech control for opening web links or application menus doesn’t suit (even though it works well), or finer control over Windows is required, Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.5 can also be used for direct mouse pointer control. “Mouse grid” displays a grid overlay that can then be refined repeatedly by speaking the number of one of the sub-squares within each grid square, until something on-screen is contained within it, after which “mouse click” achieves the obvious. “Move mouse left” and “stop” both work as you’d imagine, too.
The boxed edition of Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.5 Premium comes with a corded microphone headset for dictation purposes, but iPhone users can now also use a free app that turns their phone into a cordless microphone. Both PC and iPhone need to be on the same local network for this to work, but it’s a handy extra and one that lets you wander around the room while you work. There’s no option in the app to record speech for later transcription, but Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.5 can already import various audio file formats and you can always use the stock iPhone voice-recording app.
It takes time to master NaturallySpeaking's features, but once you do it works like the stuff of science fiction.
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