Re: XyWrite and Voice Recognition

["Irv Thomae" irv.thomae@xxxxxxxx]

On Tue, 05 Jan 1999 10:15:59 -0500, Emery Snyder wrote:

>Generally the whole voice recognition thing seems Not ready for prime time.
> .....
> And as soon as you have any professional jargon, the things take tons of
>training.

 This may seem counter-intuitive, but given a well-defined body of
specific "professional jargon", some voice-rec systems get much *better*.
 In "my day job" as a software developer, I've spent the past six months
working with a company that has adapted Dragon's "Naturally Speaking" to
medical transcription of radiologists' reports.  The vocabulary is
certainly large, but it's also much more predictable than everyday speech,
and this permits them to achieve better than 98% accuracy after only about
half an hour of "training" to the user's voice.