Description:
Voice-recognition systems can be a real help to people who have to generate a lot of text and can't--or don't want to--type. The systems, though dramatically improved, still require a bit of babying to yield the best results. In Talk to Your Computer: Speech Recognition Made Easy, Dan Newman explores voice-recognition technology in generic terms (i.e., without getting very far into the details of specific software packages). He shows how to set up a workstation for voice work, how to adjust your voice for the most accurate recognition, and how to re-engineer business procedures so that they benefit most from voice-recognition software. Readers might enjoy the brief case studies of people who benefited from being able to speak to their computers. There's a nice buyer's guide to software and microphones, but the entries on the software packages are insufficient for real decision-making. This is a good book, and voice-recognition technology is sufficiently novel that Newman manages to avoid sounding boring even when he opines about how to sit at a desk. Still, Talk to Your Computer would be far better if it more fully addressed the relative merits of the top voice-recognition packages and gave some information on their configuration options--perhaps a chapter each for the various versions of IBM ViaVoice, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, Philips FreeSpeech, and L&H Voice Xpress. --David Wall Topics covered: Technologies that make it possible for you to speak into a microphone and have your words correctly rendered as text by a computer. Without making much mention of specific voice-recognition software packages, the author tells how to set up your computing environment for maximum accuracy, personal comfort, and work efficiency.
| 
