5 ms·

Its pretty impressive. I haven't touched much upon trying such things for quite a few years when I last had a quick play with Dragon Naturally Speaking. It's

Its pretty impressive. I haven't touched much upon trying such things for quite a few years when I last had a quick play with Dragon Naturally Speaking. It's getting PRETTY close, with a basic cheap laptop microphone, my Australian accent, and no training. But I did say pretty close. Not exactly right. And I'm only speaking a few sentences. I read out a passage aloud, and apart from not quite getting everything right (but getting some remarkably difficult words/names correct), the thing that struck me is how written word, and the art form of such, is in fact quite different from a verbal stream of spoken words. The little sigils and breaking up of a written text conveys a whole bunch of meaning and subtlety that a word for word stream doesn't quite get. For me, its just inaccurate enough to still be irritating. Everything's working fine, and then I hit a mis-dictated word, have to do a bit of a double take and ask myself "What the...what on earth does it think i'm trying to say here...oh...i said THAT!" which breaks the flow of anything but the most basic and primitive sentence. But then that makes me wonder, you know what... how many humans can actually follow everything I'm actually saying? It's not like I can peer into their heads and verify the transcription of voice-to-words inscribed on their brains.

danieltillett 11y ago
Humans don't follow what you say :) On this topic I have never managed to get my typing above 60 women because this is as about as fast as I can think ahead writing.
- smhg 11y ago
  I wouldn't complain if you can type as fast as 60 women! ;)
  - wohlben 11y ago
    indeed, he probably utilizes superior techniques with multiples keyboards simultaneously!
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    Lol. Got to love the auto correct of wpm to women :)
- shrikant 11y ago
  Autocorrect misinterpreting what you intended to type is a delicious irony in this context!
- markatkinson 11y ago
  Hahaha, this made my day. 60 women indeed.
- creshal 11y ago
  Also known as the "room full of typewriter-armed secretaries" technique?
jessriedel 11y ago
> I read out a passage aloud, and apart from not quite getting everything right (but getting some remarkably difficult words/names correct), the thing that struck me is how written word, and the art form of such, is in fact quite different from a verbal stream of spoken words. The little sigils and breaking up of a written text conveys a whole bunch of meaning and subtlety that a word for word stream doesn't quite get. Worth noting that kids who start using this young will have much less problem adapting their speech for automated transcription. Likewise, adults often were drawn to "natural-language capable" Ask Jeeves, but kids just searched with alta vista using grammatically bizarre but effective terms.
ascorbic 11y ago
Do the voice commands work for you? I just read it a letter from my insurance company and it was not far off word perfect, including URLs and email addresses. I can't get most of the voice commands to work though, which is pretty annoying. Punctuation and new paragraphs work, but none of the new commands such as deletion and formatting. It says English-only, but does that mean US English? I'm UK English. "delete delete last word delete line select line delete paragraph oh I give up"
- ACow_Adonis 11y ago
  Not accurately enough (given I haven't read much of the documentation). I actually verified it was kinda picking them up, but it did this weird thing where I managed to insert a period if i remember correctly, but then it took it out after I kept talking?
melling 11y ago
Dragon Naturally Speaking has been great for years. Developers have been using it to cobble together a voice programming solution for a few years: https://www.extrahop.com/community/blog/2014/programming-by-voice-staying-productive-without-harming-yourself/ https://www.extrahop.com/community/blog/2014/programming-by-... http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/using_voice_to_code.html http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/using_voice_to_code.html I've got more notes on Github: https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes/blob/master/programming_by_voice.org https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes/blob/master/progra... We really seem to be at the point where voice is ready to become part of our daily use once a real API becomes available. People who use Dragon, for example, need to use the Windows version because of the hooks to Python.
- cbhl 11y ago
  Wasn't there a case where the core engineer on Dragon was screwed out of being able to continue working on the product / in the field?
  - jamessb 11y ago
    Dragon was sold to L&H, which had been engaging in fraud and went into brankrupcy; some of the technology was apparently sold to Visteon, some to ScanSoft (which then acquired Nuance, and took on its name). The founder, Jim Baker, lost out and unsuccessfully tried to sue Goldman Sachs (who had been advising him). And yet, even today what happened next to the Bakers seems remarkable. With Goldman Sachs on the job, the corporate takeover of Dragon Systems in an all-stock deal went terribly wrong. Goldman collected millions of dollars in fees — and the Bakers lost everything when Lernout & Hauspie was revealed to be a spectacular fraud. L.& H. had been founded by Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie, who had once been hailed as stars of the 1990s tech boom. Only later did the Bakers learn that Goldman Sachs itself had at one point considered investing in L.& H. but had walked away after some digging into the company. - a 2012 NY Times article "Goldman Sachs and the $580 Million Black Hole" http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/business/goldman-sachs-and-a-sale-gone-horribly-awry.html?_r=2 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/business/goldman-sachs-and... recent discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10994707#up_11014194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10994707#up_11014194
Splanky222 11y ago
Curious, are you using the English (Australia) setting?
- ACow_Adonis 11y ago
  Yep, I used the english(Australia) setting. Though I wonder whether it might be an issue with the types of Australian accents as well. We don't have the accent diversity of the brits/north-americans, but we do still have 2 or 3 kinds with some local variation. Plus I know some Australians have asked where my accent is from (err...Australia?), so I accept the possibility that my own little idiosyncrasies might be throwing it off a bit, even though when I travel overseas and talk, I think I sound like Steve bloody Irwin...
rybosome 11y ago
> But then that makes me wonder, you know what... how many humans can actually follow everything I'm actually saying? It's not like I can peer into their heads and verify the transcription of voice-to-words inscribed on their brains. As far as I know, I have good hearing, and I often struggle to understand people. It would be interesting to see what a human error rate on transcription is.
- SwellJoe 11y ago
  I have historically done my own transcription for closed captions on my company's YouTube videos (we have a policy to never post a video without captions, as accessibility matters to us), but recently started outsourcing it to a friend on fiverr. We're close and she knows my accent well, and hears me talk about the subjects of the videos now and then, but even she has to verify some stuff with me along the way. I don't have an exact number for errors, or how often she has to verify words and phrases with me, but it's higher than I would have expected. I also recall when I worked in television, we'd have someone come in to do captions for the Rockets basketball games...they made a lot of mistakes. Maybe every other sentence had a mistake in it. Partly this was the speed at which they had to type (using a Stenotype style device with chording keyboard), but I suspect they were also mis-hearing things quite often. In particular, technical terms (whether for computers or basketball) are elusive if you don't speak the language. "WYSIWYG" was a tricky one, in one of my videos.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

danieltillett 11y ago

Humans don't follow what you say :) On this topic I have never managed to get my typing above 60 women because this is as about as fast as I can think ahead writing.

smhg 11y ago
I wouldn't complain if you can type as fast as 60 women! ;)
- wohlben 11y ago
  indeed, he probably utilizes superior techniques with multiples keyboards simultaneously!
- danieltillett 11y ago
  Lol. Got to love the auto correct of wpm to women :)
shrikant 11y ago
Autocorrect misinterpreting what you intended to type is a delicious irony in this context!
markatkinson 11y ago
Hahaha, this made my day. 60 women indeed.
creshal 11y ago
Also known as the "room full of typewriter-armed secretaries" technique?

jessriedel 11y ago

> I read out a passage aloud, and apart from not quite getting everything right (but getting some remarkably difficult words/names correct), the thing that struck me is how written word, and the art form of such, is in fact quite different from a verbal stream of spoken words. The little sigils and breaking up of a written text conveys a whole bunch of meaning and subtlety that a word for word stream doesn't quite get. Worth noting that kids who start using this young will have much less problem adapting their speech for automated transcription. Likewise, adults often were drawn to "natural-language capable" Ask Jeeves, but kids just searched with alta vista using grammatically bizarre but effective terms.

ascorbic 11y ago

Do the voice commands work for you? I just read it a letter from my insurance company and it was not far off word perfect, including URLs and email addresses. I can't get most of the voice commands to work though, which is pretty annoying. Punctuation and new paragraphs work, but none of the new commands such as deletion and formatting. It says English-only, but does that mean US English? I'm UK English. "delete delete last word delete line select line delete paragraph oh I give up"

ACow_Adonis 11y ago
Not accurately enough (given I haven't read much of the documentation). I actually verified it was kinda picking them up, but it did this weird thing where I managed to insert a period if i remember correctly, but then it took it out after I kept talking?

melling 11y ago

Dragon Naturally Speaking has been great for years. Developers have been using it to cobble together a voice programming solution for a few years: https://www.extrahop.com/community/blog/2014/programming-by-voice-staying-productive-without-harming-yourself/ https://www.extrahop.com/community/blog/2014/programming-by-... http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/using_voice_to_code.html http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/using_voice_to_code.html I've got more notes on Github: https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes/blob/master/programming_by_voice.org https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes/blob/master/progra... We really seem to be at the point where voice is ready to become part of our daily use once a real API becomes available. People who use Dragon, for example, need to use the Windows version because of the hooks to Python.

cbhl 11y ago
Wasn't there a case where the core engineer on Dragon was screwed out of being able to continue working on the product / in the field?
- jamessb 11y ago
  Dragon was sold to L&H, which had been engaging in fraud and went into brankrupcy; some of the technology was apparently sold to Visteon, some to ScanSoft (which then acquired Nuance, and took on its name). The founder, Jim Baker, lost out and unsuccessfully tried to sue Goldman Sachs (who had been advising him). And yet, even today what happened next to the Bakers seems remarkable. With Goldman Sachs on the job, the corporate takeover of Dragon Systems in an all-stock deal went terribly wrong. Goldman collected millions of dollars in fees — and the Bakers lost everything when Lernout & Hauspie was revealed to be a spectacular fraud. L.& H. had been founded by Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie, who had once been hailed as stars of the 1990s tech boom. Only later did the Bakers learn that Goldman Sachs itself had at one point considered investing in L.& H. but had walked away after some digging into the company. - a 2012 NY Times article "Goldman Sachs and the $580 Million Black Hole" http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/business/goldman-sachs-and-a-sale-gone-horribly-awry.html?_r=2 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/business/goldman-sachs-and... recent discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10994707#up_11014194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10994707#up_11014194

Splanky222 11y ago

Curious, are you using the English (Australia) setting?

ACow_Adonis 11y ago
Yep, I used the english(Australia) setting. Though I wonder whether it might be an issue with the types of Australian accents as well. We don't have the accent diversity of the brits/north-americans, but we do still have 2 or 3 kinds with some local variation. Plus I know some Australians have asked where my accent is from (err...Australia?), so I accept the possibility that my own little idiosyncrasies might be throwing it off a bit, even though when I travel overseas and talk, I think I sound like Steve bloody Irwin...

rybosome 11y ago

> But then that makes me wonder, you know what... how many humans can actually follow everything I'm actually saying? It's not like I can peer into their heads and verify the transcription of voice-to-words inscribed on their brains. As far as I know, I have good hearing, and I often struggle to understand people. It would be interesting to see what a human error rate on transcription is.

SwellJoe 11y ago
I have historically done my own transcription for closed captions on my company's YouTube videos (we have a policy to never post a video without captions, as accessibility matters to us), but recently started outsourcing it to a friend on fiverr. We're close and she knows my accent well, and hears me talk about the subjects of the videos now and then, but even she has to verify some stuff with me along the way. I don't have an exact number for errors, or how often she has to verify words and phrases with me, but it's higher than I would have expected. I also recall when I worked in television, we'd have someone come in to do captions for the Rockets basketball games...they made a lot of mistakes. Maybe every other sentence had a mistake in it. Partly this was the speed at which they had to type (using a Stenotype style device with chording keyboard), but I suspect they were also mis-hearing things quite often. In particular, technical terms (whether for computers or basketball) are elusive if you don't speak the language. "WYSIWYG" was a tricky one, in one of my videos.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]