Category Archives: Dragon NaturallySpeaking

Watch for Dragon 11.5

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It looks like a new point release of Dragon NaturallySpeaking – 11.5 – will be available for free download for Dragon 11 customers within a few weeks.

Articles about the point release tout its new-found ability to use the iPhone as a wireless microphone for Dragon over wifi. The point release also has some new commands for a couple of very popular websites: Twitter and Facebook.

There have been some more subtle changes as well, including bug fixes aimed at making things run smoother. We weren’t recommending that our customers jump to 11, partly because version 10 was still a little faster, but 11.5 is probably worth the change.

This is the first time since NaturallySpeaking 3.5 that Dragon has done a mid-point release. That one was free as well, only back then Dragon had to send CDs out to everyone.

Here’s where to watch for the free download for Dragon 11 customers:

http://www.nuance.com/dragon/whats-new-upgrade/index.htm

http://www.nuance.com/for-business/by-product/dragon/product-resources/whats-new-version-11/index.htm

Redstart Systems will also have an announcement within a couple of weeks — watch this space.

Spell Everywhere

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I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about the Dragon NaturallySpeaking “Spell XYZ” command. This command lets you say, for instance “Spell s a”. People are complaining that it sometimes doesn’t work. They’re right.

This command doesn’t work everywhere. It only works in text boxes. This is an unfortunate oversight in the Dragon user interface.

Logically, any speech command should work in all contexts where it could be useful. It’s unnecessarily difficult to make the user remember different commands to carry out the same operations in different contexts. Something as basic as pressing a letter key should work anywhere you might want to use a letter, including menus.

This is what people are complaining about. Those who are complaining have gotten adept enough at speech that something basic like pressing letter keys becomes second nature. They have a habit of saying “Spell” and then a letter, number or symbol name whenever they have to hit separate keys. The definition of habit is you don’t have to think about it. And this is where they get in trouble — the habit kicks in everywhere, including when you are in a drop-down menu that doesn’t respond to full words.

If you’d like to use the “Spell XYZ” command everywhere rather than having to stop and think about where you can and can’t use it, complain to Nuance, the company that makes Dragon (there are couple of ways to do this — details are posted on the Redstart wikki: http://redstartsystems.com/Wikka/wikka.php?wakka=NatSpeakUtilitiesandResources).

What’s in a name? Lots.

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I get a lot of inquiries from people who are confused about the Dragon speech engine’s many names, and also the name of the company that owns it.

Here’s a brief history:

The Dragon speech engine has changed hands twice, but the name of the company owning it has changed three times.
In the beginning Dragon Systems created the DragonDictate speech engine. Also in the beginning several other companies also created programs that let you speak to a computer: Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, Lernout & Hauspie, IBM and Philips. These early speech engines all required you to pause between words. This was a somewhat frustrating way to dictate and was hard on your voice.

Dragon, Lernout & Hauspie, IBM and Philips eventually improved their speech engines so you could dictate in phrases. When Dragon Systems brought out continuous speech recognition, it changed the name of its product to Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Dragon NaturallySpeaking generally worked better for dictation than DragonDictate.

People who were trying to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking hands-free, however, found that Dragon NaturallySpeaking lacked some of the DragonDictate features. Some of us who needed hands-free speech input used a combination of DragonDictate and Dragon NaturallySpeaking for years. (For me it was until NaturallySpeaking 3.5 came out. There are still a couple of features that were in the old DragonDictate that haven’t made it into Dragon NaturallySpeaking. The one I miss the most is the ability to go straight to a macro script from the recognition dialog box where you could see what Dragon had heard.) So DragonDictate was used and talked about long after development stopped.

Just before Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 5 came out Dragon Systems was sold to Lernout & Hauspie, makers of rival speech engine VoiceXpress Pro. NaturallySpeaking 6 was a merger of the products, keeping the NaturallySpeaking name and most of the look and feel (with the notable exception of the macro creation facility). When Lernout & Hauspie famously melted down, the Lernout & Hauspie speech assets were sold to ScanSoft, a company that started with optical scanning recognition technology acquired from Xerox, who acquired it by buying Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc., one of several companies started by Ray Kurzweil. (The Lernout & Hauspie speech assets also included the Kurzweil Voice speech engine, which Lernout & Hauspie had acquired by buying Kurzweil Applied Intelligence, another company started by Ray Kurzweil.)

Just before ScanSoft acquired Dragon, they’d signed a 10-year deal with IBM to market IBM’s ViaVoice, which by then included PC and Mac versions. After the ScanSoft acquisition there were no more new ViaVoice products. Over the next few years ScanSoft acquired many more speech-related companies including Nuance. After the Nuance acquisition, ScanSoft switched its name to Nuance. Some people refer to the old Nuance as blue Nuance and the current Nuance as green Nuance. (This was the second name change for ScanSoft. It was founded in 1992 as Visioneer.)

This year, Nuance created an iPhone app named Dragon Dictation — name sound familiar?

Also this year Nuance bought MacSpeech. There’s some name history here too. MacSpeech’s original speech engine for the Mac, iListen, was based on Philips FreeSpeech2000 speech engine. MacSpeech changed its product name to match the company name after signing an initial deal with Nuance in early 2008 to use the Dragon NaturallySpeaking engine. (Later in 2008 Nuance bought Philips Speech Recognition Systems.) After buying MacSpeech Nuance renamed the speech engine product to Dragon Dictate for Mac. Name sound familiar? The old DragonDictate had no space between words. The new Dragon Dictate is two separate words.

OK. Got that all straight? There’s a little more nitty-gritty. The Dragon NaturallySpeaking product line includes a basic version, middle version, professional version, legal version and medical version. The professional, legal and medical versions all originally had the “Dragon NaturallySpeaking” first and middle names, but somewhere along the line the legal and medical versions lost NaturallySpeaking, becoming Dragon Legal, and Dragon Medical.

Meanwhile, the basic version and middle versions have recently changed names. The basic version has in the past gone by “standard” but is currently “home”. The middle version has in the past gone by “preferred” but is currently “premium”. There’s also a sub-basic version not usually sold by resellers that can be found in retail stores usually around Christmastime named Dragon NaturallySpeaking Essentials.

One last thing. I’m not sure where Dragon Speak came from. I’ve heard many people refer to Dragon NaturallySpeaking as Dragon Speak, but that’s never been an official name — so far.

So — I hope that clears everything up.

Utter Command has always been named Utter Command — just saying.

Suggestion for Dragon: Easier Correction

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In the last couple of months I’ve had a couple occasions to suggest to the folks at Nuance, the company that makes the Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech engine, that their “Resume With” command is under advertised. The command is very useful, but I keep meeting people who don’t know about it.

“Resume With” lets you change text on the fly. For instance, if you say “The black cat jumped over the brown dog”, then — once you see it on the screen — change your mind about the last bit and say “Resume With over the moon”, the phrase will change to “The black cat jumped over the moon.”

This is a particularly useful command for doing something people do a lot — change text as they dictate.

Now I have a suggestion that I think would make the command both better and more often used. Split “Resume With” into two commands: “Try Again” and “Change To”. The two commands would have the same result as “Resume With”, but “Try Again” would tell the computer that the recognition engine got it wrong the first time and you are correcting the error. “Change To” would tell the computer that you are simply changing text.

This would be a less painful way to correct text than the traditional correction box. Users are tempted to change text rather correct it because it’s easier. This would make it equally easy to correct and change using what is arguably the fastest and easiest way to make a change.

Easy correcting is important because NaturallySpeaking learns from correcting and because it’s annoying when the computer gets things wrong. Correcting improves recognition. Minimizing the interruption reduces frustration and lets users concentrate on their work rather than spending time telling Dragon how to do its job. From my observations, many users are tempted to change text rather than correct it when the computer gets something wrong simply because it’s easier.

It would be great to have these commands both in Dragon NaturallySpeaking on the desktop and in Dragon Dictation, the iPhone application. This would enable truly hands-free dictation in Dragon Dictation.

Trying out Dragon Search for the iPhone

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Dragon Search is a nice app. Here’s how it works: open the app, hit one button, speak the phrase you want to search for. By default the app stops listening and starts the search when you pause so you don’t have to hit another button when you’re done.

The app comes up quickly, which from a practical standpoint is extremely important. And in my experience so far the search has been fast. There’s also a button you can push to cancel out of the search. The big plus of this application is the different search channels: Google, iTunes, Twitter, Wikipedia, and YouTube. You can search for something, like green apples, and the results will come up in the channel you used last. Once you’ve done a search you can switch channels easily to see results across channels.

I have a couple of practical suggestions.

1. The history list is just three items long — I’d like a much longer scrolling history list. Google Voice Search has a long scrolling list that includes dates. I would’ve liked to have seen Nuance improve on that.

2. I’d also like to be able to add my own channel.

I’ll also take the opportunity to repeat what I said a couple of days ago. I appreciate the progress on speech apps — don’t get me wrong. But speech on the iPhone is still not what I really want, which is system-level speech control of a mobile device that would give me the option to use speech for anything. These new apps are steps in the right direction — making the iPhone more hands-free. But there’s still a long way to go.

A few more thoughts on Dragon Dictation

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I’ve been using Dragon Dictation on the iPhone a little more over the past few days and have a couple more thoughts for improvement.

1. If you select text in the full-screen application, then switch to the keyboard the text doesn’t stay selected. The text should stay selected. If you’ve selected an incorrect word or phrase, found there are no correct choices, and are proceeding to the keyboard to correct it. It’s frustrating to have to select again.

2. I’ve lost dictation a couple of times because I’ve switched out of the app — this is unexpected because writing apps like Notepad tend to stay where you left them. I suspect that Dragon Dictation maker Nuance made this choice in order to limit the number of steps for new dictation. I think there are ways to provide this valuable option without increasing steps. The quick solution would be a “remember last dictation option” in settings that would let the user decide which way to do it. Maybe a better solution would be adding a “continue” button to the bottom of the initial screen that would give you the option to continue. So if you wanted to start fresh you would press the main button in the middle of the screen, but if you wanted to continue you could press the smaller “continue” button at the bottom of the screen.

Trying out Dragon Dictation for the iPhone

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I’ve been trying out the Dragon Dictation iPhone app. It’s still not what I really want, which is system-level speech control of a mobile device that would give me the option to use speech for anything. But it’s a step in the right direction of making the iPhone more hands-free.

Here’s how Dragon Dictation for the iPhone works: open the app, hit one button, speak up to 30 seconds of dictation, then hit another button to say you’re done. Your dictation shows up on the screen a few seconds later. Behind the scenes the audio file you’ve dictated is sent to a server, put through a speech-recognition engine, and the results sent back to your screen. Now you can add to your text by dictating again, or hit an actions button that gives you three choices: send what you’ve written to your e-mail app, send it to your text app, or copy it to the clipboard so you can paste it someplace else.

The recognition is usually fairly accurate in quiet environments. Not surprisingly, you get a lot of errors in noisy environments. To its credit, on a mobile device the built-in microphone is not optimal for speech-recognition. It does pretty well given these constraints.

Here’s a practical suggestion that should be easy to implement: Add a decibel meter so people can see exactly how much background noise there it is at any given time. This would make people more aware of background noise so they could set their expectations accordingly.

The interface for correcting errors is reasonable. Tap on a word and there are sometimes alternates available or you can delete it. Tap the keyboard button and you can use the regular system keyboard to clean things up.

I have two interface suggestions:

1. You can’t use the regular system copy and paste without going into the keyboard mode. You should be able to. I suspect this is fairly easy to fix.

2. There is no speech facility for correcting errors. I think there’s a practical fix here as well.

First, some background. Full dictation on a mobile device is tricky. Full dictation speech engines take a lot of horsepower. Dragon Dictation sidesteps the problem by sending the dictation over the network to a server running a speech engine. The trade-off is it’s difficult to give the user close control of the text — you must dictate in batches and wait briefly to see the results. This makes it more difficult to offer ways to correct using speech. But I think there is a good solution already in use on another platform.

Although it’s difficult to implement most speech commands given the server setup, the “Resume With” command that’s part of the Dragon NaturallySpeaking desktop speech application is a different animal. This command lets you start over at any point in the phrase you last dictated by picking up the last couple of words that will remain the same and dictating the rest over again.

This would make Dragon Dictation much more useful for people who are trying to be as hands-free as possible. It would also lower the frustration of misrecognitions and subtly teach people to dictate better.

It’s nice to see progress on mobile speech. I’m looking forward to more.

Tip: Scrolling by speech

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I’ve gotten several questions lately about scrolling by speech, which is key to comfortable hands-free operation. Utter Command gives you several ways to scroll by speech. The best way depends on the situation.

To quickly look something over, use the speech command that allows you to see successive screens with a pause between changes. For example, “3 Screen Down Wait” moves down a screen, then after a default wait of two seconds moves down another screen, then two seconds later moves down a third screen. If you want a longer wait, add a specific number of seconds, e.g. “3 Screen Down Wait 5″ (UC Lesson 7.23). 

To directly control the scroll bar by speech, place the mouse pointer on the scroll bar using a command like “99 by 10″ and use the vertical drag command to move the scroll bar to a given point. For example “Drag By 50″ moves the scroll bar to the middle. Then, if you then want to go three quarters of the way down say “Drag By 75″. You can also control the scroll bar incrementally, for instance, “Drag 3 Down” (UC Lesson 4.2, 4.5).

In some programs, including some versions of Word, the cursor moves to the page you scrolled to when you use an arrow command like “5 Down”. And in some programs, like Firefox, you can say a link number to move the cursor. In these cases you can leave the arrow parked on the scroll bar, edit the text, than say another drag command to move the scrollbar without having to move the mouse to the scrollbar again. In some programs, including WordPad, you have to move the cursor to the new page by clicking. In this case, keep the right ruler open on your screen so you can easily click back to the scroll bar when you’re ready to scroll again.

- If you use this method a lot, try naming a mouse click to move the arrow to the scroll bar at the home position (UC Lesson 10.24).

- You can also use this method to control horizontal scrollbars — use the “Drag 1-100 By” command.

- If you’re a ZoomText user, you can use this method even when the scrollbar is not showing on the screen.

Tell me what you think about scrolling by speech – reply here or let me know at info@ this website address.

Tip: Beat the heat

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Here in Boston right now it’s ridiculously hot outside. If you’re using speech recognition on a computer in a room that’s hot, you might have a fan going and/or the computer fan might be going continuously rather than occasionally. And if this is the case, you’re probably getting worse than usual recognition.

There something you can do about it, however. Dragon NaturallySpeaking does an audio check when you initially train a user. The audio check adjusts sound levels and checks for background noise. If your background noise changes, it’s a good idea to do an audio check. This includes if it’s a hellishly hot day out and there’s extra fan noise around.

To do an audio check say
1. “NatSpeak Accuracy” to open the NatSpeak Accuracy Center window
2. “Under c” (or “Under Charlie”) to click “Check your audio settings”, which brings up the Audio Setup Wizard dialog box
3. Now follow the instructions to go through the wizard

Unfortunately the Audio Setup wizard is not hands free. Log a complaint to NaturallySpeaking maker Nuance about this (see the UC Exchange page on NatSpeak Utilities and Resources for ideas about where to do so.)

Remember to run the Audio Setup Wizard whenever the general noise around you changes, or when you take a laptop to a new space. Accurate audio settings make for faster, better recognition.

Keep cool.

What are your speech pet peeves? Tell me about them – reply here or let me know at info@ this website address.

Tip: Not my mistake

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One thing that the Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech engine could do better is hyphenation. I don’t mind so much when I say something that should be hyphenated and it’s not. I can always say the NaturallySpeaking command “hyphenate that” or the UC command “1-10 Hyphenate” after the fact if the NaturallySpeaking engine leaves out the hyphenation. I can also specify hyphenation when I want it, e.g. “on hyphen the hyphen fly” will type “on-the-fly”.

If I have something that’s not hyphenated and should be, it’s either a mistake or something I accidentally left out.

But if NaturallySpeaking puts in hyphenation where I don’t want it, there are two problems. First, there’s not an easy way to remove hyphenation after the fact — I have to select the phrase, then say it again in two phrases so it won’t be hyphenated, which is 3 steps. Second, there’s no way to specify no hyphenation.

If NaturallySpeaking over-hyphenates and I don’t notice, it looks like I’m consciously adding hyphens where they shouldn’t be. There’s nothing more annoying than having another entity introduce mistakes into your work.

Because the minuses of over-hyphenation are larger than the minuses of not hyphenating enough, when I see a phrase hyphenated when it’s not supposed to be I remove the hyphenated version from Natspeak Vocabulary so it won’t happen again.

For instance, I removed “follow-up”, which I often put as a stand-alone tag in my todo list. It’s a clunky workaround, but it’ll have to do until speech engines get better at analyzing hyphenation.

To remove a vocabulary word say “NatSpeak Vocabulary”, say the or phrase you want to delete, “Under d c” to delete and close the window, and “Enter” to confirm the change.

I think Nuance could mitigate this problem with a pair of in-line commands: “no-hyphen that” would remove hyphenation in the last phrase and “no-hyphen” would specify that something not be hyphenated, parallel to the “no-caps” command. I’m adding this to the Nuance wish list.