Voice-operated: a word-of-mouth success
Speech-to-text tools are improving and can be a real boon for people who find typing difficult
Having long called for voice-operated interfaces, I’m finally using a speech-to-text application – to dictate this column, no less – and the surprising thing is, it more or less works.
Just before Christmas, I contracted a very painful case of tennis elbow in my right arm. Too much work at the keyboard. By the New Year, I was in physiotherapy. The physio told me to stop all work for three weeks. Given how impossible that was, I soon became desperate enough to research, finally, software packages that would allow me to work without using my right arm.
Poor accessibility has a price
To my surprise, Apple does not make its own speech-to-text software. To my greater surprise, however, IBM makes and Amazon sells IBM ViaVoice 3.0 for Mac OS X version 10.3. After waiting in vain for Amazon to deliver, I phoned the Apple Store in London’s Regent Street and was told they had one shrink-wrapped cardboard box of goodies left in stock.
At closing time, 9pm, one cold Monday night, I slipped into Apple’s very busy shop and bought the box for £90 – £10 more than one pays on Amazon.
For that, I got a CD, an 88-page instruction manual and a rather tightheadset made in China. Wrestling my Apple preferences from US English to British English, I successfully installed what turned out to be ViaVoice 3.2. An afternoon was spent training my machine to understand me by reading it passages from Alice in Wonderland.
After the training, I found that my Apple did understand most of the words I read to it. You have to keep your head up and enunciate very clearly, and slowly too. The machine adjusts for birds and passing aeroplanes if you trained it while they were overhead; but it does not adjust to incoming phone calls, coughs, or me clattering around my desk. Nevertheless, its initial performance is quite promising.
The main problem: the instruction manual. One needs to master some key commands – for example, “Begin spell”, or “Capitalise on”. Yet I have to turn to pages 41 and 21 to find out how. The manual’s “Welcome” section runs to 25 pages, and the rest makes a meal of navigating with commands, and of corrections.
It turns out that I want to navigate not by voice, but by using my left hand. Given how I am incapacitated, the main thing is that, most of the time, I’m now able quickly to dictate large amounts of simple text without making many corrections. IBM wants me to make those corrections by voice, on a special window, so that my computer could learn to understand me better. In fact, I again prefer to use my left hand.
The moral of my tail? As you can see from that mix-up of homonyms, there’s a lot of fun to be had with ViaVoice. It recognises words like homonyms and ViaVoice straight off the bat. What it still sorely needs is a better understanding of human factors, learning versus doing, and the realities of keyboard pain and keyboard use. Nevertheless, IBM has shown us the future, and for that my right arm is very grateful.
Good luck to the #farmers on their march today!
I probably don't need to tell you to wrap up warm. But please remember that no part of the UK's green agenda is your friend. All of it is intended to deprive you of your livelihood, one way or another. That is its design.
Brilliant piece by @danielbenami. RECOMMENDED
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Innovators I like
Robert Furchgott – discovered that nitric oxide transmits signals within the human body
Barry Marshall – showed that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori is the cause of most peptic ulcers, reversing decades of medical doctrine holding that ulcers were caused by stress, spicy foods, and too much acid
N Joseph Woodland – co-inventor of the barcode
Jocelyn Bell Burnell – she discovered the first radio pulsars
John Tyndall – the man who worked out why the sky was blue
Rosalind Franklin co-discovered the structure of DNA, with Crick and Watson
Rosalyn Sussman Yallow – development of radioimmunoassay (RIA), a method of quantifying minute amounts of biological substances in the body
Jonas Salk – discovery and development of the first successful polio vaccine
John Waterlow – discovered that lack of body potassium causes altitude sickness. First experiment: on himself
Werner Forssmann – the first man to insert a catheter into a human heart: his own
Bruce Bayer – scientist with Kodak whose invention of a colour filter array enabled digital imaging sensors to capture colour
Yuri Gagarin – first man in space. My piece of fandom: http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/10421
Sir Godfrey Hounsfield – inventor, with Robert Ledley, of the CAT scanner
Martin Cooper – inventor of the mobile phone
George Devol – 'father of robotics’ who helped to revolutionise carmaking
Thomas Tuohy – Windscale manager who doused the flames of the 1957 fire
Eugene Polley – TV remote controls
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