Biographical Information

Articles by Peter Fleming

Continuous Dictation

The joining of Internet capability with television has opened up new possibilities for speech as an interface. Video and audio telephone connections are now possible over conventional telephone lines as well as over larger, faster fiber optic and other fast connections. "Interactive television," which could also make use of speech recognition, is as yet a largely unexplored technology.

Continuous Dictation

Speech technology is finding a home as an input device for interfacing with the Internet, opening even more utilization doors for our segment of the electronic revolution.

Continuous Dictation

In a changing field, speech recognition dictation continues to be altered in radical ways. The purchase of Dragon and Dictaphone by L&H made a small world even smaller. There were previously four players in the world of large vocabulary speech recognition. Now there are three.

Continuous Dictation: Guidelines to Consider Before Purchasing Hand-Helds

Hand-held recorders offer increased mobility for speech recognition dictation "on-the-go." Recording into a handheld recorder is quite different than dictating directly to the computer for speech recognition. Following are some guidelines that might be used in buying and using recorders.

Continuous Dictation: Speech in Hand

Welcome to the new world of mobile speech recognition! Small hand-held recorders now allow the user to dictate almost anywhere, free of the computer. Later, the material can be downloaded to a computer for processing by speech recognition. The computer will automatically type out the recorded material. This is a very exciting development in the history of speech recognition

Continuous Dictation: The Future of Speech Recognition

Looking into our crystal ball, what do we see for the future of computer dictation speech recognition? Allow me to make some predictions.

Continuous Dictation: New Voice Xpress Released

Lernout & Hauspie has released an entirely new edition of Voice Xpress. We review here "Professional" version 2.02, which is similar to lower editions of the same vintage, the "Standard" and "Advanced" editions, available in price ranges of about $50, $80, and $130.

CONTINUOUS DICTATION:

Many interesting new products were released during the last quarter of 1998 and early this year. In this column, we will discuss some of the ones we had the opportunity to see and found especially impressive.

Free Speech: Philips Joins Continuous Dictation Race

Philips has introduced a large vocabulary, general English dictation system for business, correspondence, and general use. FreeSpeech98 is the fourth new dictation system to come to market along with IBM, Dragon, and Lernout & Hauspie. Philips was actually the first to offer commercially available continuous speech recognition in the vertical market for radiology and other applications.

Bold Beginning for A New Speech Recognition System

Recently two completely new continuous speech recognition dictation systems have appeared on the scene, one from Philips, and another from Lernout & Hauspie, as well as new versions of existing systems from IBM and Dragon.

Financial Applications: Speech Delivers For Brokers

In September 1994, a New York-based service bureau providing telephone and Internet transactional services to banks and brokerage houses worldwide, ushered in the age of real-time, online stock trading. Since then, digiTRADE's list of customers has grown to include brokerages and financial institutions like Bear Stearns, Chase Manhattan, Citicorp, T. Rowe Price, and others.

Continuous Speech: New Microphones, Software and Developments in Dictation

Here are some of the new latest developments in large vocabulary dictation computer speech recognition.

Continuous Speech: Better Over Time

Developers of speech recognition products typically, and for the most part fairly, make the claim that their products get better with use. Speech products recognize words with a higher rate of accuracy as they become more accustomed to a person's speech patterns. In this article, we will attempt to describe the performance of IBM's ViaVoice and Dragon's NaturallySpeaking over the last two months since our previous article. IBM's ViaVoice appeared to be perhaps slightly less accurate than Dragon's NaturallySpeaking, after their initial training sessions. With time, and the training which goes with it, IBM's performance appears to have improved. However, Dragon may still have an edge.

The Verdict is in for Continuous Speech

For someone who has been using and testing speech recognition systems for over five years, the new continuous speech, large vocabulary dictation systems available now are like breaths of fresh air, truly marvelous, the industry's version of the Holy Grail.

Speech’s Price War

In some ways, the cost of current large vocabulary speech recognition systems is artificial. Decades of research and development have made speech recognition programs among the most complex and expensive computer programs ever devised. However, the cost of reproducing software is trivial. The transition from hardware-dependent to software-only products indicates that speech recognition technology has become, in some sense, totally intellectual property, only a “sequence.” But, of course, the genetic code of an entire human being is expressible as “merely a sequence of nucleotides” (...after millions of years of evolution).

Speech's Holy Grail

Through a remarkable technology developed over decades of research, it is now possible to dictate free text to a computer and have it “recognize” one’s speech and “type” it out, without fingers ever touching the keyboard. Sound waves, vibrations of air, are transduced into electrical impulses by microphones.