The idea of being able to talk to a computer rather than type has long been a pipe dream, and not just for people who can't get to grips with a keyboard. Sadly, the technology has yet to reach a point where people can converse freely with a PC and have it understand what they're saying, but speech recognition for more mundane dictation purposes has been possible for quite a few years now. Nuance leads the field for desktop speech recognition and Dragon Dictate 2.0 is the latest version of its software for Mac OS X.
As the back of the Dragon Dictate 2.0 box points out, most people can talk much faster than they can type, but speech recognition isn't quite so quick to set up as just plugging in a keyboard. Automated telephone answering systems may be able to respond to a limited selection of spoken commands from just about any caller, but the speech recognition offered by Dragon Dictate is designed to recognise open-ended verbalisation for text transcription purposes, and so requires some initial voice training with the person using it.
Although speech recognition software employs a range of sophisticated audio, contextual and statistical analysis techniques to cope with homonyms and other tricky aspects of language, the basic idea involves matching elements of speech to the contents of a word database. By asking the user to speak the word "dog", for example, the software knows that whatever noise the user makes in response can always be interpreted as "dog" and displayed in type accordingly. This is where voice training comes reading on-screen text aloud so that the speech recognition software can get a measure of how a user says certain words, the cadence of their speech, and so on.
-
Cleo attack victim list grows as Hertz confirms customer data stolen – and security experts say it won't be the lastNews Hertz has confirmed it suffered a data breach as a result of the Cleo zero-day vulnerability in late 2024, with the car rental giant warning that customer data was stolen.
-
Women show more team spirit when it comes to cybersecurity, yet they're still missing out on opportunitiesNews While they're more likely to believe that responsibility should be shared, women are less likely to get the necessary training
-
OpenAI wants developers using its new GPT-4.1 models – but how do they compare to Claude and Gemini on coding tasks?News OpenAI says its GPT-4.1 model family offers sizable improvements for coding, but tests show competitors still outperform it in key areas.
