Nuance software's voice of experience

SOFTWARE FIRM Nuance has has launched a new product on the Irish market.

Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 is a speech recognition software package, which the company claims is 99 per cent accurate in the transfer of information from voice to screen.

Nuance claims the product is the most precise on the market and the best iteration of its speech recognition software to date.

According to Jonathan Whitmore, Ireland and UK manager for Nuance, which employs 4,000 people worldwide, this is the software company's first serious venture into Ireland and is in partnership with distributor BEE (Business Electronic Equipment).

Dermot Hanna, sales director of BEE, said its plans for the Irish market were to provide brand awareness across all sectors for the product.

"A key factor will be to communicate the advantages that this software will bring in relation to increased productivity, ease of use and the cost saving that can be made by companies that adopt it," he said.

BEE said it would be pushing Dragon at the legal, financial, medical, educational and special needs/assistive technology sectors. "Pretty much every sector can benefit from Dragon Version 10 software," said Hanna.

According to BEE, even the print media will benefit from using this type of software now that it is more accurate.

Dragon 10 allows a user to control a PC by using their voice.

All the well-known computer applications such as word processing and spreadsheet packages can be worked on through voice commands. In addition, the software also allows users to surf the internet and compose and send e-mails.

One of the big issues with previous voice recognition software was the length of time it took to train it to recognise a user's voice and create a profile for it.

According to Whitmore, this time span has been pushed aside and tuition now takes a matter of minutes.

He claimed that a person could start using the product straight away, although for optimal results, training the software is the best route to take.

"Speech recognition will never be 100 per cent perfect because we all speak differently and have diverse ways of pronouncing words and so on. Therefore the software will transcribe what it thinks is correct. However, it will still learn as it goes along."

To tackle some of the speech obstacles, Nuance said Dragon 10 now has enhanced capabilities for regional dialects and, interestingly, teen-style speech patterns.

The demonstration itself was quite impressive, with Whitmore conducting a number of tasks including writing a word document, creating a spreadsheet, navigating the internet and writing and sending an e-mail, and all by using voice commands.

The software responded well. However, it did get some words wrong. Generally, it worked quite well and was surprisingly smooth, even when surfing the internet using voice instruction to search for sites such as YouTube and playing a video from it.

With speech recognition finally, perhaps, achieving the results that it promised over 10 years ago, why has it still got such a poor reputation as something that, ostensibly, doesn't work all that well?

"Well, if you bought a car four to five years ago, it had a certain amount of functionality and it was okay. Compare that to where we are now with cars and the technology that's inside them. There's been a huge leap in what's available.

"Speech recognition has gone through this phase and there was in the past this sort of stigma that, yes, it didn't work and took too long to train it to recognise your voice. But as you can see, it is easy to set up and the idea of it not being able to distinguish and transcribe your voice properly has gone away.

"As I said it won't be perfect for everybody but the technology has improved," said Whitmore.