Ok, I admit it, I am talking to my computer!

But that is not a sign of mental state or acute loneliness but called voice recognition.

Basically, it is software where you can speak into your computer and the computer types out what you say. It doesn't look as silly as on my main page either, with your head bent into the keyboard.

There is a headset microphone that you can use. It comes with the software.

I have been fascinated with this ever since I heard mention of the development of a so-called IBM "voco-typer", a typewriter that types what you say.

Apparently, IBM started work on this about thirty years ago and just in the last few years a couple of companies have come out with products that are quite usable. It did not turn into a typewriter but into software that can be used with PCs.

My personal choice has been DragonDictate from Dragon Systems. I have been using the version 2.5 of DragonDictate for Windows for one year now with very high satisfaction.

I find that voice recognition works best for entering new text and I am using it for anything which is longer than a couple of paragraphs (such as this email). Voice recognition does not work well for navigation in programs or for editing existing text. Also, program code with its many symbols does not work with voice recognition.

I am a very fast typist but find that my typing speed has not increased in the last couple of years. However, with voice recognition I have quickly approached that speed and will probably soon surpass it. Also, it is much more fun to dictate than to type.

One main disadvantage of voice recognition is that at this time all existing packages require "Discrete speech", which means that you have to leave a brief pause between each word. That is kind of a nuisance since it is not really naturally speaking. But still one can achieve a quite high speed in getting documents into the computer.

Now recently two companies have announced or are delivering systems which apparently can handle continuous voice recognition. One of these is Dragon Systems Naturally Speaking (http://www.dragonsys.com) and is already shipping, the other is ViaVoice from IBM (http://www.software.ibm.com/is/voicetype/us_menu.html) and is announced for August '97.

I believe that it is just a matter of time until voice recognition becomes quite widely used and acceptable. To me it seems similar to the first chess computers. Fifteen years ago, what you could buy was just barely able to follow the chess rules and occasionally violated them. For example, in certain end-game situations the program would move the King onto a field like H9. Today, a good chess computer can play as good or better than 99 percent of human players.

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