Hearing Voices

Directions on Microsoft analyst Michael Cherry tried out the speech recognition engine in Microsoft Office XP and concluded that he isn’t quite ready to ditch his keyboard. The text frequently shows several false starts (marked with a crossbar) before Cherry manually entered the correct text.

For many years I have hoped that speech recognition would make it easier for me to work with my computer. Several years ago when I purchased and I’m back computeran iMac computer I found the speech recognition program for the buybackiMac. (At this point, Cherry entered the word “iMac” into the speech recognition program with his pronounciation.) While the program cost only 49 dollars I had hoped that the program would allow me to dig take Dick K. T. dictate specifications, technical documents, and white papers, making me more productive as a program manager.

Despite training the program for several hours including reading most of Treasure Island to my computer I found that the program was unable to make me more productive. Technical words, application programming interfaces, jargon, and code names such as many tests Mantis, would come out as anything but the word mantis was just too frustrating.