Hello, computer?

I’ve been testing voice recognition software for at least five years. I haven’t written about any packages because I haven’t found one that works well enough for me to use for more than a few minutes without becoming frustrated.

That day may be coming, however, with the release of the latest generation of speech recognition products. Lernout & Hauspie’s (L&H) VoiceXpress 4 Professional, which came out this month, “typed” 120 to 130 words per minute with an average of nine recognition errors when I tested it on a 450-MHz Pentium III with 128M bytes of memory. Compare that to my typing about 60 words per minute, with three errors.

I was fairly happy with the speed and accuracy, especially considering you can improve the accuracy several ways. First, you have to reduce the product’s sensitivity to background noise. If you don’t, it interprets random sounds as random words when you’re not talking and mangles other words when you are. Keep the microphone away from white noise sources such as fans. Each time you sit down to dictate, tune the microphone.

Second, make sure you train the software to recognize your voice. L&H calls this process “enrollment.” The company provides several passages for you to read into the microphone. Each takes about 10 minutes. Once you’re done, the computer processes your speech to create internal models for your pronunciation. That process took about 75 seconds on my computer.

I suggest enrolling more than once; I found that recognition improved after I read a second passage.

You can improve accuracy further if you train the program as you go along. If VoiceXpress enters an incorrect word, you can highlight it and choose from a list of alternate words that you might have meant, or type in the correct one. If you click on the Train button, the program makes you pronounce the new word twice, after which it does a better job understanding it in the future. You can use a similar process in advance for any unusual words you use frequently. I noticed improvement the longer I worked with and trained the software.

I found VoiceXpress works better for dictation tasks than for editing documents. My tendinitis would have to turn into full-blown carpal tunnel syndrome before I’d edit using voice commands alone.

I don’t have much room to touch on the product’s cool features for executing complex commands by making simple statements such as “number the next two paragraphs,” nor space to detail how it works with other Office applications, not just word processing. Though VoiceXpress 4 Professional can enter words faster than I can type, it can’t find more space for my column.

categories Articles | Administrator | datetime Monday, June 21, 1999 12:00 pm | comments Comments (0)

New life for old Acrobat

Since its introduction, Adobe’s Acrobat has been the most popular software product for allowing users on different computer systems to read each other’s files. But these days, Microsoft Word is so common that it’s a de facto exchange format, and Word documents can be modified, whereas, until now, Acrobat files could not. Adobe had some catching up to do if Acrobat was going to survive.

With Acrobat 4.0, Adobe breathes new life into an application that was threatened with obsolescence. This most recent version, released last month, takes the product in healthy new directions.

You can now digitally sign Adobe Portable Definition Format (PDF) files so recipients can verify they haven’t been modified. A recipient can annotate or add to the file, then sign it himself and pass it along again. Any recipient can roll back to anyone’s digital signature, creating built-in version control. You can do a side-by-side comparison of two versions of a document to easily spot changes.

Web pages and browser interfaces are also excellent ways to present layouts combining text and graphics, though putting together sophisticated content isn’t always easy. Acrobat 4.0 lets you convert HTML pages to PDF format, preserving hyperlinks intact. Why would you want to do that, when it’s generally easier just to mail someone a URL? E-mailed links don’t always work with active content, and not all Web pages have long shelf lives.

With a PDF file of a Web page, you can use Acrobat to mark up and annotate pages – to say, for example, “Why can’t we do this on our Web page?” You can add notes, highlight text and objects, and add audio annotation. You can annotate a PDF document by attaching a file to it, to say, “Here – make our page look like this, but with this information.”

Also new are macros that you can access by clicking a button on a toolbar in Microsoft Office applications. PDFMaker and PDFWriter let you save Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents in PDF format. You can also open Office documents directly within Acrobat; the application automatically converts them to PDF. With other applications, you can drag a document to the Acrobat icon to convert it. And you can save and e-mail a PDF file in a single step using any MAPI-enabled e-mail application.

With a complex page made up of text and graphics, a PDF file takes up more space than the individual components. For instance, all the items on our Network World Fusion home page took up about 92K bytes of space in our browser cache. A PDF file made of the same page took 171K bytes – almost twice as large. But on the plus side, the PDF file combines dozens of elements – HTML code, graphics and style sheets – into a single manageable unit.

The improvements in Acrobat 4.0 make it a must-have for anyone already benefiting from Acrobat 3.

categories Articles | Administrator | datetime Monday, June 7, 1999 12:00 pm | comments Comments (0)

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