How not to do business on the Internet: Part 4 – Voice Recognition – There is a sucker born every minute
Why do I keep thinking that Voice Recognition – especially the software pandered by Dragon Naturally Speaking – is anything other than unmitigated %&#@ ?
I have a long and painful history with Dragon Software. The general principle of Voice Recognition (VR) holds a lot of promise. Dictating to your computer, instead of typing, saves your wrists and gets more work done. After I tried Dragon and had a REALLY bad experience some years ago I had not looked at this software.
What changed ? What in the world would make me go back and get burned again? Simple – for my birthday I received a present that actually works as advertised. Call me shocked and awed. Seriously. Today I received the SmartShopper, a very cool gadget that you hang on your fridge and just walk by press a button and tell it what you need to buy from the store. Just walk up and tell it ” Mineral Water”. Bam. Done. When you get ready for the weekly run to the store it actually prints a nice little list for you. What’s even more amazing it worked with all 3 members of my family. No training required !
I can highly recommend SmartShopper as one of the best little gadgets I have seen in a long time.
I thought wow this must be because of VR technology has advanced so much. Didn’t that ad for Dragon Naturally Speaking promise ” no training”. I promptly picked up a $30 copy of it and tried to install it. Looked fine until I got to the very end where I was greeted by a Windows Installer Error 1722. That’s really useful isn’t it. I am sure it has to do with Vista – even thought the Dragon box proudly proclaimed that it is Vista Compatible. Sure…… maybe Dragon is but the MSI simply barfs at that end. Thinking this should not be a problem, let me just contact Dragon tech support they must have seen this before. I went through the user registration – why do they insist on recording a street address? This is the Internet people….. what do you need my street address for? And why would you make my home phone number a required field? Right then I flashed back to my problems with Dragon years ago. It all came flooding back end even though the product is now owned by NUANCE, the basic premise hasn’t changed.
After listing way more information than necessary (but needed because all fields were controlled by a Required Validator) I pressed the “Continue” button and was faced with the Internet equivalent of a bait and switch. Sure we will sell you some crappy software and when you come looking for help we will make you PAY 10 BUCKS
Installing it on an XP machine works just fine. And yes, the dictation module is better than it has been 5 years ago. Less errors. It still prompts for training, in spite of the product box advertising “no training required”.
I really wonder when companies like this will get the message. $10 for some basic tech support to fix their own installer is ridiculous. I wonder how many unsuspecting, less technically inclined people, fall for this and pay up.
Comments
Comment from Thomas
Time August 10, 2007 at 4:53 am
Brett- Thats good to hear! And wow 130 words per minute thats is very fast. I can’t even think that fast, much less express myself coherently at such speeds. Thats very impressive.
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Comment from brettbum
Time August 9, 2007 at 9:14 pm
I’ve been using Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 preferred since about February. Before that I hadn’t touched DNS since version 3 or 4.
I’m using it on an XP system (vista capable machine) but I haven’t tried it with Vista yet.
The software does work very very well and today I use DNS for about 40-50% of my writing/typing. That saves my hands and wrists quite a bit as I do a lot of writing and typing.
I found that it worked out of the box with decent accuracy, but it quickly learned (not training just writing some of my own stuff and the software getting used to my words, vocabulary, enunciation-or lack there of) fairly quickly. After a couple hours I did an hours worth of training and the accuracy improved tremendously.
I now do about 1 hour of training per month, just to kind of keep things fine tuned. Nuance doesn’t recommend that or anything, but it gives me some placebo like confidence that the software is working better, kind of like the old days when you would point your cell phone antenna towards a tower.
In general, I highly recommend the software, especially for anyone that uses a keyboard too much. I type about 80 words per minute touch typing and can type about 130 words per minute on average with DNS9.
I notice that errors or mistakes tend to pop up if my computer is running low on memory. DNS is a slight memory hog, but I use Firefox and that is a tremendous memory hog. If Firefox has been open with multiple tabs for several days on my machine, I see a bit of a degradation in DNS and usually restart firefox or sometimes the machine itself.
I’ve got 1 GB of ram on my laptop and will probably add a couple more soon and see if that helps. At worst its one more placebo I figure.