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Sunday, Nov 16, 2008
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Say ‘hello’ to your computer!

Anand Parthasarathy

New edition of Dragon ‘Naturally Speaking’ recognises Indian English

BANGALORE: The ability of computers to understand and transcribe spoken language is not something new. The first mass consumer products in speech recognition came almost 30 years ago but they have never been reliable enough to interest lay users, until now.

In the mid-1980s, this correspondent recalls being present at the first India launch of a product called Dragon ‘Naturally Speaking.’ When the American marketing head of the company spoke some sentences into a microphone attached to a personal computer, the software magically converted his speech into an MS Word file, displayed on the monitor. “You can sack your stenographer!” he said jokingly. But when I tried to replicate the experiment, the screen filled with junk: It did not recognise most of what I spoke. Dragon was built by Americans for American accents; and we Indians spoke quite differently.

Since those days, speech recognition software has evolved and so have the PC platforms with which they work. Yet, the accuracy rate of products in the market was still patchy and they remained niche offerings for special markets, like the physically challenged.

Today, finally, the technology seems to have matured to a stage when lay users like you and me can seriously consider it as a useful option. Dragon ‘Naturally Speaking’ was taken over by another company, Nuance Communications, which specialises in speech products, and the latest edition, version 10, just released, has a new option of ‘Indian English’: recognition at last that significant numbers of users in this country speak the language differently from Americans.

Good accuracy

The product is on a DVD which must be installed on your PC or laptop and comes with a headphone-microphone combo which can be plugged into the same computer. As always with such software tools, the makers recommend that you ‘train’ it to recognise the speech patterns peculiar to you, by speaking some test sentences; but even without this precaution, the new version is surprisingly accurate in its recognition.

Dictating straight text instead of entering it on the keyboard is of course the primary advantage. But version 10 is also useful – albeit slightly less reliable if you want to avoid keying in requests to open a web page, formatting text in a word processor or just want to say “Send email to Ravi and Madhavan,” “Search for Aishwarya Rai photos,” etc.

The standard version of Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 costs Rs.5990, while a slightly bigger ‘Preferred’ version is priced at Rs.11,990.

Of course, Windows XP and Vista have had a speech recognition feature for some years now; but being a ‘free’ add-on, it cannot boast the accuracy and range of Dragon which is generally known to be possibly the best available today with special features that make it easy to work with popular applications like Firefox, Internet Explorer, Outlook or Word.

In other languages

A separate product from Nuance, tailored for call centres, offers speech recognition in nine Indian languages so we can hope some day to give voice commands to PCs in our mother tongue.

Meanwhile, can we look forward to interacting with our computers, entirely by voice, Indian English, that is? No; but there will be situations like driving and checking e-mail when the ability to ‘talk’ to your computer can make for both safety and ease.

Say hello to your PC – IT’s all ears, and all yours!

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