12 August 2014

Why it’s time to look again at speech recognition software

For years speech recognition has seemed the most natural way to interact with our tech devices, but only in recent times has the technology started to go mainstream. Many of us are already using speech with our smartphones, our tablets and even our games consoles, not just to type, but to search, find information or access features. Now the latest technical advances are making speech recognition a faster, more accurate way to work with any PC or laptop.

Why? Well, almost anything you can do with a keyboard and mouse, you can do with speech recognition – and often faster. It’s still a great way to create Word documents, but it’s just as good when it comes to writing or replying to emails, posting updates to Facebook and Twitter or searching the Web. What’s more, the new Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 makes it easy, giving you great, effective speech recognition right out of the box.

In the past, speech recognition involved training. Often, you may only be required to spend twenty minutes to an hour teaching the software to learn your voice, but real accuracy required a longer stretch.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 has been designed to give you accurate recognition without training, so that it gets up to 99% of what you say from the moment you start using it. As long as you talk naturally and at normal speeds, you should be able to dictate two to three times faster than you type, and the enhanced recognition accuracy means less need to backtrack and fix errors.

And while you work, the software’s learning on the job. It analyses your text, picking up the words and phrases you use the most and working out how to spell the more difficult words or proper terms correctly. It adapts to your accent and your writing style.

Now that Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 allows for full voice commands and text control in Gmail, Outlook.com and Yahoo! Mail, you can even have it scan your sent mail folder. It will look through your mails and adjust its language models to match your vocabulary. Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 is 15% more accurate than NaturallySpeaking 12.

That’s not the only way it saves you time. The new interface is much more intuitive, enabling you to start work quickly and focus on what you’re writing, not the process. There’s more built-in help than ever before, and it takes just four steps to set up your individual profile, and start the software working how you want it to.

Better still, the days when you had to don a headset microphone are in the past. The latest Dragon Naturally Speaking is happy to work with the microphones built into many laptops, Windows tablets and all-in-one PCs, while you can also work with a smartphone and dedicated app, or a range of Bluetooth microphones and headsets. Again, Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 makes it easy for you, automatically detecting which microphones are currently available, so that you can select one and just get to work.

This is speech-recognition as it should be – the kind of experience that all those sci-fi movies promised. Some of us have struggled with speech recognition in the past, but don’t let that put you off today. The technology is ready, and it’s time for another look.

This article is brought to you in association with Nuance. Buy Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 online.

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