ON COMPUTERS : Talk-to-type programs take baby steps forward
Posted on Monday, September 22, 2008
If you’ve ever called for airline reservations, you’ve dealt with voice-recognition software. A robotic voice asks you if you want “reservations” or “flight status.” If you say “cheeseburger,” the robot says, “Sorry, I didn’t get that.”
You can have this kind of fun on a regular basis with voicerecognition software. Theoretically, it can save you the trouble of typing. You just dictate what you want written. This is particularly handy if your typing speed is somewhere near the national average, 40 words per minute.
The leader in this field is Dragon NaturallySpeaking from Nuance. com, which can transcribe 160 words a minute. We wrote about the very first version back in 1991. It’s come a long way, baby, but it’s still wearing short pants. By that, we mean that some things are still annoying.
The program came with a headset and microphone that didn’t work with our Hewlett Packard computer. It didn’t recognize the sound card. This is the most common brand of computer in the world; the sticker on the front says “more than 50 million PCs sold.” We had to buy a USB microphone instead, which bypasses HP’s sound card.
Though the program claims a 20 percent accuracy improvement over the previous version, Joy’s test, even after a 15-minute training period, produced an error rate of 10 percent, or one in every 10 words. “Lamp” got translated as “land.” “ From that I gather” became “Fanatic gather.” But on the fourth try, the program missed only one word in 184.
We were impressed with the new time-saving steps built into the professional version of the program, but this costs $ 900, compared with only $ 100 for the standard version. If you want to e-mail “Fred,” for example, just say: “E-mail Fred.” Then start talking. The professional program then fills in Fred’s address and puts your next words into the subject line of the e-mail. When you’re ready for the body of the message, you say “body field.” You can do something similar to schedule a meeting, and it will open your calendar program and fill in the details. But it only works with programs like Microsoft Outlook, not Webbased e-mail and calendars from Yahoo or Gmail.
If you want to see a map for a location, speak that location: “search maps for Harvard Museum.” You would give similar commands to search for photos, videos, shops, etc. The program will also accept leading Web site names. So you can say: “Search YouTube” or “Search eBay,” and so on.
Finally, you can have voicerecognition software for free if you use Windows Vista. It has a terrific tutorial, which we found easier than learning Dragon. Though Vista made more mistakes than Dragon, the mistakes were much easier to correct with voice commands and without any practice.
KINDLE-ING Just as some movies go straight to the video market and never show up in theaters, today some books are going straight to digital format instead of print. The biographies of Cindy McCain and Michelle Obama, for example, are available as Amazon Kindle e-books this month. The wife of the winning candidate will see her biography printed on paper. THE TRUTH ABOUT ID THEFT
The Truth About Identity Theft, by Jim Stickley (around $ 14 at Amazon. com ), reads like a good mystery novel. Stickley has hacked Social Security numbers, robbed banks and created fake credit cards. But he’s not a criminal. He’s a regular on the Today show, and has been hired to show companies how to guard against having their customers ’ credit information stolen. One of the best things about the book is how it’s organized. You can thumb through it while reading the headlines in the right-hand margin, stopping only on the pages that interest you. Here are some that caught our attention: “Hotel business centers can be treacherous.” And: “Being dead doesn’t protect you from identity theft.” And don’t forget “Fake credit card applications.”
It turns out that half the hotel business centers the author frequented had key loggers installed on their computers. That meant that all keystrokes were being recorded, including your password information and other sensitive data. He advises that you never use a hotel computer for e-mail.
He is also concerned about people who use a Bluetooth hands-free device to talk on their cell phones. It’s not just that they look funny walking down the street talking to themselves. It’s that many of these phones have a “pairing” feature that is always on, allowing anyone nearby to listen to the calls. If your device doesn’t have what’s called “manual pairing,” he suggests leaving your phone off until you make a call.
INTERNUTS FirstWivesWorld. com is a social networking site for divorced women. It was founded by the guys who brought the book / movie First Wives Club to Broadway. Besides information on how to get a divorce or how to cope with one, the site has Web loggers weighing in on topics such as “An Open Letter to My Husband’s Mistress.” The site also has video tutorials on how to make new friends through the site.
TheOnlineMom. com is a nice technology guide for moms needing to get up to speed on what their children are doing. Why are they watching You-Tube, for instance ? A link to the YouTube article has examples of nearly every kind of video people watch, as well as safety guidelines. “Mom, Can I Have a Cell Phone ?” deals with a question moms are getting at an increasingly early age. Lots of resources here, including links to other sites for women. The site reports that users of the top social networking sites, Facebook and MySpace, are now 60 percent female. NOTE: Readers can search several years of columns at the “On Computers” Web site: www. oncomp. com. You can e-mail Bob Schwabach at
bobschwab@aol. com and Joy Schwabach at joydee@oncomp. com.
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