Nuance has announced Release 10 of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. (TBD... anticipated August 7)
The New York Times has a review that seems like it could have been written by Nuance marketing! But David Pogue speaks his mind, some of you will find his review interesting.
If you don't yet use NaturallySpeaking, I suggest reviewing other material about speech recognition. Release 10 promises to be better than prior releases, but it isn't the Release 10 features that make NaturallySpeaking tops in its class!
Nuance understands this is fundamental to customer adoption and satisfaction. Claimed is 20-25% fewer errors.
Faster commands for doing these functions, reducing multiple steps into one. Handles Google, Yahoo, eBay, Vista desktop search, and several other web and desktop search engines. These commands will open the browser, start the search, etc.
Dragon Voice Shortcuts for Email and Calendar allow you to better control Microsoft Outlook.
Partially cosmetic, options have been added to format titles, US social security numbers, and numbers less than 10. In the Vocabulary Editor, the interface for Word Properties has been rewritten. Now EACH word can have two different "alternate written forms" e.g. one form for after numbers, another for before numbers.
When you set up Dragon, you will now have to schedule (or not) Data Collection, the Acoustic Optimizer, and the Language Model Optimizer.
Now you can use US English spellings with a variety of different accents -- UK English, Aussie, SE Asian, Indian, Southern, Hispanic, even Great Lakes accents.
These are mainly "under-the-hood" improvements. Personally I noticed an improvement in this area, reducing my errors substantially. But I know that individual results will vary widely and that some will benefit more than others. (Between releases 8 and 9 I personally did not gain much accuracy. But most of my customers did!) It is too early to tell how significant the accuracy changes may be.
The value depends on how and how often you do searches!
BUT: The feature sometimes misfires, searching when you don’t intend to use this feature. Quit starting sentences with “find’ and “search” or else those misfires become annoying. If you are using NaturallySpeaking only for dictation, I’ll advise you to turn off this feature.
I have not tested this. I don’t use Outlook contacts or calendar (I use Time and Chaos), so this feature has little benefit to me. If you use Outlook contacts, it looks useful.
This is mainly a slightly-improved interface. The quicker way to cause numbers 2-9 to be displayed as Arabic numerals is a welcome addition. The new option for formatting Social Security numbers, that is, formatting nine digit numbers as nnn-nn-nnnn, will help a few.
BUT: The “Abbreviate Titles” option isn’t perfect. Words used in titles like “General”, “Major”, and even “Sister” sometimes get erroneously abbreviated as “Gen.”, “Maj.”, and “S.” which can make your written material look sloppy if not corrected.
If you don’t use the "Abbreviate Titles" option, then you will probably want to change the Alternate Written form of “Mister” to be “Mr.” unless you routinely write “Mister Jones…” instead of “Mr. Jones…”
The "Common Abbreviations" is ... (please look at the Help file for this, have a laugh, and report back to me) Please, please tell me who uses almost all these abbreviations! After all, they are "common"! You should buy Release 10 to fully understand what I mean by this comment.
Release 10 forces users to deal with these optimizers. Perhaps you turn them off, perhaps you leave them on.
BUT: If you schedule them to run, they are demanding and really wants to run at the scheduled time. Don’t be cavalier when setting this up. If you are working late finishing an important document and it is time for these to run, beware! You may have little choice but to try to save the document and then let it run. It introduces complexity for new users as they have no clue whether to run this or not, or when to run it, etc.
I only tested with my own accent so don't know how much this will help.
Higher RAM and CPU requirements are needed to support the changes. Minimum per Nuance is 1GHz, 512MB RAM and recommended is 2.4GHz (1.6GHz if it is a dual-core system), 1GB RAM. If using for heavy production use, move to a dual core system, 2.2GHz or faster, with 2GB or 3GB. After all, such systems are less expensive now than NaturallySpeaking Pro/Med/Legal products.
New is needing the SSE2 instruction set and requiring at least 512KB L2 cache memory. What this means in practice is that some systems bought before 2006, most commonly AMD systems, may not work. Sempron CPU's are specifically affected, others are too. It just won't work!
There is still no support of 64-bit operating systems. So those of you with 64-bit Vista systems, and those of you with Windows-XP 64-bit systems, will have to use Microsoft Speech (else use Orca to work around the install issues... definitely not supported or recommended, but may be possible).
This book is not going to be available until at least September 10, and possibly as late as October 1, 2008. The Scripting for Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8/9 books remain applicable for DNS 10 scripting.
For pricing on new products (full-version) see the Products section. For upgrade pricing, see Upgrades.
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