Do as I say

Voice recognition is undeniably cool technology – when it works. But aside from acting as a glorified secretary to which you dictate memos, what good is it?

Dragon Systems has an answer with NaturallySpeaking Mobile Organizer. The product bundles Dragon’s NaturallySpeaking Preferred voice recognition software with NaturallyMobile Recorder, a digital voice recorder. This handy hardware is as light as a mouse, yet can store 40 minutes of dictation, or 120 minutes if you add an additional SmartMedia card. Each message is stored as a separate file, and you can organize messages into folders if, for example, more than one person uses the recorder.

When you connect the recorder to the serial port of your desktop PC using the provided cable, the PC software wakes up the recorder and downloads the sound files to the disk drive. It then translates them into entries for your personal information manager (PIM) program. I used Act! 2000; you can also use Lotus Notes, Microsoft Outlook, the Palm Desktop or GoldMine.

You don’t merely dictate text into the recorder. You can use it to schedule meetings or action items, or send e-mail messages. For example, suppose you say: “Send e-mail to Roberta Francis about her Web site period blah, blah, blah.” When you get to your computer, Mobile Organizer automatically downloads and interprets the sound file, finds Roberta Francis in your contact database, creates a message with her e-mail address, a subject of “her Web site,” and a body of “blah, blah, blah.” You can edit the information and train the program to fix its misunderstandings. When you’re happy with it, click a button to send the message to the PIM.

The latest version of NaturallySpeaking adapts to the way you speak in part by reading documents you’ve written. Its Vocabulary Builder utility analyzes the vocabulary and sentence structure you use so it can make better choices.

I had only three complaints about the product. First, the software is very slow to load; it took more than 70 seconds on my 500-MHz Pentium III. If you load it only once a day when you start up your system, that isn’t a big issue. But the hardware/software combination also takes quite a while to download speech files and transcribe them on the PC.

The second problem is a perennial one related to speech recognition – it ain’t perfect. But if you use the software regularly and train it faithfully when it encounters words it fails to recognize, it does get better.

Finally, although the recorder is light and comfortable to hold, the power and record buttons are awkwardly situated.

Still, speaking to enter data is easier than typing it. NaturallySpeaking Mobile Organize can turn wasted minutes into productive time. This is one of the few Cool Tools I want to keep after the review is written.

categories Articles | Administrator | datetime Monday, February 21, 2000 12:00 pm | comments Comments (0)

Faster phone line networks

I’ve written before about my frustrations getting my home computers networked. I tried power line networking, phone line networking and wireless. The problem was that while connectivity improved over sneakernet, the speed was more like orthopedic shoes.

That’s all about to change for wired and wireless connections. I tried D-Link Systems’ DHN-910 Home Phoneline Network, and I’m happy to report that home networks are now up to speed.

Ethernet speed, that is. D-Link promises 10M bit/sec throughput. I actually got more than 11M bit/sec doing an FTP file transfer of a 4M-byte file using Ipswitch’s WS_FTP Pro application. The file, a snapshot of a system.dat file, was probably fairly compressible, accounting for the better-than-expected throughput.

I’ve been surprised by products’ performance before, but it’s generally not such a happy surprise.

The DHN-910 package includes two PCI adapters, two phone cables and software. The adapters comply with the new HomePNA 2.0 standard for 10M bit/sec throughput, released in December. As such, they should interoperate with other vendors’ adapters, as well as 1M bit/sec HomePNA 1.0 hardware. D-Link’s was the first of these products I’ve seen; since I didn’t have any others to test, I’ll reserve judgment on interoperability.

The software is called MidPoint Lite, a stripped-down proxy server from MidCore Software. Run the proxy software on your Gateway computer, and it acts as a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol server for your internal clients. It could hardly be simpler, which is just what you want in a product used mostly in homes. There’s also a CD-ROM with a couple of shareware network games.

The only drawback I found was a slight performance hit on the Gateway system, a 450-MHz Pentium III connected to the Internet via cable modem, as Internet requests now had to pass through the proxy server. But the added delay was generally only a second or so, and I can live with that.

I got to know one of D-Link’s technical support crew pretty well when one of my adapters died. She expertly walked me through many steps to try to get it working again before she told me to check the LEDs on the adapter. They were dark; it was dead. D-Link quickly sent a replacement that worked just fine. You can buy additional adapters if you have more than two PCs to connect.

Phone line networking isn’t the only hardware moving to Ethernet speeds. The new standard for wire-less data communications is 11M bit/sec. I’ll be taking that for a spin in a few weeks.

categories Articles | Administrator | datetime Monday, February 7, 2000 12:00 pm | comments Comments (0)

WordPress Themes