NaturallySpeaking Applications

There may be a finite number of situations where NaturallySpeaking could be used to make one’s typing life easier, faster and more productive but after 18 years of working with speech recognition there seems to be an infinite number of annoying “gotchas” that can get in the way. Many of these “NaturallySpeaking problems” are actually system problems and most of them are easily resolved.

Unfortunately many “newbie” users are unaware that they even have a problem — they are simply disappointed with the accuracy and performance they seem to be able to achieve and assume that it is a limitation of the speech recognition technology.

This blog will explore the various speech recognition issues we encountered and resolve while assisting our clients to be successful. In the course of these discussions we welcome others who have opinions or experience that are relevant and may be helpful.

I have a number of ideas for interesting speech recognition and NaturallySpeaking topics in mind , however I thought it would interesting test drive this new “vehicle” by first soliciting specific problems or issues from blog readers.
As this is a new blog, it may take a while to generate some suggestions in which case I will start down my own list.

Matter of fact, lets go ahead and start with a curious one …

Question: Why does NaturallySpeaking suddenly start talking to itself and writing something like “up up up up”?

Answer: Turn off your cell phone, or move it farther away from your microphone or sound card. This is the speech recognition equivalent of the “dubda dubda dubda dubda” sound that you may occasionally hear when your cellphone updates while it is near a radio or a computer’s speakers. Has this ever happened to you?

Looking forward to many interesting discussions!

(This document created, edited, and revised by voice using Dragon NaturallySpeaking.)