Persona Survey results

[Eric S. Johansson]

  On 8/21/2010 6:59 AM, Maurice McCarthy wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I read the survey last night and it makes interesting reading.
>
> A few people mentioned Dragonsoft programs such as Naturally Speaking
> and Dictate. Forgive me if I am wrong but earlier this year I was
> looking at these sort of programs.
>
> Naturally Speaking has not undergone any development for over 2 years
> and is now half price in Amazon. When I also discovered that voice
> recognition is vastly improved in Windows 7 I leapt to the conclusion
> that Microsoft have bought Dragonsoft and incorporated their product
> into Windows. I may be wrong but this sort of thing has happened often
> - Roxio cd burner, Visio CAD and Winternals to name the obvious ones.

NaturallySpeaking version 11 was just released. It has been improved but not in 
the ways that matters. It has a bunch of gui "improvements", some speed and 
accuracy improvements. I can't find out if they've improved the number of a that 
controls it works with. I can almost guarantee you it does not work with any of 
the open source edit controls such as gtk+ or wxwindows. On the other hand, 
there's been a lot of activity in the wine community and I would not be 
surprised if this was the year we had a working solution.

Windows speech recognition is completely separate from nuance. I've been told 
it's on par with NaturallySpeaking 10.1. Unfortunately, Microsoft is even less 
responsive to the needs of the disabled than nuance. Quite a pity.  One of the 
Microsoft developers was hanging out on the voice coder list and helped out 
significantly with using Microsoft's speech recognition and then he vanished 
when we started asking questions, hard questions about bug fixes. We call this 
the "I think I hear my mommy calling" effect.

> Against my better nature I bought a copy of Win7 to see for myself and
> found nothing as good as this in Linux.

Isn't it exhilarating When you find something nice (er) than what you've ever 
known and horrifying to realize you can never be satisfied with either environment.

For example, I've been looking at a bunch of windows IDE's in the vain hope that 
I will find one that will work with NaturallySpeaking. But in my exposure to 
these different tools and user interfaces, I've come to find that I like some of 
them better than Emacs but they still fall short so I find myself stuck between 
modern Windows gui's and emacs and neither work with speech recognition. Isn't 
that exquisite? It makes me weep.