Voice input (was RE: Brainstorming on scanning)

[Bob Rasmussen]

My brother-in-law is a doctor, and he does his medical dictation using 
Dragon, including their medical dictionary. So hte field has achieved a 
certain level of maturity.

Not also that recent versions of Windows include speech recognition (SR)
features, so you don't have to buy anything to experiment (maybe a 
microphone). You can even do some things without "training" it first.

I think of it in two categories. First, there's command and control - 
starting and stopping programs, navigating between windows, jumping around 
in a program, etc. In the example I mentioned, I said "prior" or "next", 
and the SR engine sent my program a Page-Up or Page-down keystroke. This 
didn't require any special awareness on the part of the program I was 
commanding. Note that for command/control, the SR engine needs to deal 
with a fairly limited vocabulary.

The second area is data input, such as typing into a word processor, or 
into FilePro. Here you're more likely to need to train the SR engine to 
your voice, because the possible vocabulary is much larger. Note that it's 
also possible to spell out entries by individual letters and numbers. This 
is important for people's names, addresses, zip codes, etc.

Maybe you could consider a third area as entry correction. If the SR 
engine guesses wrong, you need to correct what it did, and you can usually 
do that by saying "backspace", etc. Of course, if it misinterprets you 
correction commands then frustration mounts exponentially.

>From time to time I have played with SR feeding into Anzio, and found that 
I didn't really need to add anything to Anzio to enable this. One possible 
exception might be to implement support for "undo". Any other ideas, let 
me know.

Regards,
....Bob Rasmussen,   President,   Rasmussen Software, Inc.

personal e-mail: ras at anzio.com
 company e-mail: rsi at anzio.com
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 street address: Rasmussen Software, Inc.
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