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I remember watching Star Trek years ago as Captain Kirk and others carried on conversations with the computer. Several years later, as a political science student at Berkeley during the 1960s, a time when the empiricists had staged a coup and taken over the department from the theorists, I had my first opportunity to converse with a computer. Imagine my disappointment when I learned that the computer, which took up a whole building and had substantially less computing power than my current laptop, could not understand or respond to the spoken word. As computer hardware and software evolved, I kept looking for viable voice recognition technology (VRT). Each new iteration of a leading VRT program attracted my attention. Each failed to fulfill my never-ending quest to find one that worked. In the past several years, we have seen the ranks close in the development of VRT. Today we are down to only a few. The two leaders are Dragon NaturallySpeaking software (now owned by ScanSoft) for Windows-based computers and IBM which continues to develop its ViaVoice software for both Macintosh and Windows platforms. For a long time, most of the reviewers looking at VRT for attorneys considered Dragon the leader in the field. I am not so sure that remains true today. IBM’s ViaVoice for Windows Pro USB Edition, Release 10 closes the gap and might have taken the lead. The package comes with a manual, a fold-up card with the basic command structure for the software, a disk and a Plantronics (www.plantronics.com) DSP-300 stereo headset. I consider Plantronics an excellent choice, as I am particularly fond of their headsets. I have used them happily for the past couple of years for all my VRT efforts. IBM has automated the installation process well. Load the disk and tell it to install the program. After re-starting the computer and completing the installation process, the fun begins. For those who remember hours of reading into the computer to train it, only to have the program find out the computer didn’t understand you, Release 10 provides a pleasant surprise. I plugged the headset into the computer, allowed the computer to recognize it and install it as hardware, then went through a very short setup process to let the program check everything out and adjust itself to the hardware. I then read one short selection into the computer to allow the software to become familiar with my voice. The computer said I could read more or proceed to dictate. I chose to proceed with my first test. Although I knew that VRT software always works best after having had more than the basic training exercise, I wanted to see what this program could do with the most preliminary voice information. To my surprise and delight, I dictated several paragraphs into the program, and it came out substantially as I dictated it. Certainly the software made a few mistakes, but far fewer than I had ever experienced with a new VRT program, even after lengthy voice training. A little more voice training resulted in further improvement. With respect to voice-training VRT software, the more you do, the better the program gets. ViaVoice gives you the option of working in its own word processor, SpeakPad, or dictating directly into other programs. It links itself automatically to current versions of Microsoft Word. You can dictate in programs other than Word (including Corel WordPerfect), but it doesn’t work quite as automatically. In my experiments, however, the accuracy rate suffers a bit in other word processing programs by comparison to dictation in the program’s own SpeakPad. It’s possible to cut and paste text from SpeakPad to other programs if you encounter problems with ViaVoice in the other programs. I found if I spoke carefully and at a measured rate, I could get reasonably accurate output from the program using it for general dictation (letters, memos, notes, etc.). When I tried to dictate legal citations, however, the results left room for improvement. It requires substantial training to make that work right. Adding IBM’s Legal Vocabulary Pack (a separate purchase) is suppose to solve that problem, but when I tried adding the Legal Vocabulary Pack, it didn’t seem to help. VRT programs sometimes have problems differentiating between commands and dictation. ViaVoice Release 10 is no exception; it did better than earlier versions, but still, at least at this stage of its training, had frequent problems distinguishing between commands and dictation. Because of the problems I experienced with legal citations and command/dictation confusion, I will mostly use the program for general dictation purposes, and then move to Word for formatting, corrections of ViaVoice transcription errors, and the insertion of legal citations. If I took the time to work through each mistake with the program and correct it, it would improve. Presently, I am not willing to devote the time for that kind of training. I am happy, however, with the prospect of dictating to the computer to create a usable draft of text I can clean up. |
IBM Pervasive Computing Division, IBM Corp.
Price: $189.95; $89.99 for online upgrade;
$94.95 for shrinkwrap upgrade Reviewed by Jeffrey Allen, a general practice attorney with an emphasis in real estate, business transactions and litigation based in Oakland, Calif. PROS CONS VERDICT |
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