Voice Input Programs – An Overview
From the earliest days, it has been the dream of computer scientists and science fiction writers for computer users to be able to communicate with the machines merely by talking. Think about HAL, the computer in Kubrick’s 2001 – A Space Odyssey. That was released in 1968 when a small computer would take up more room than the ground floor of the average house – and the best way of communicating with such a computer was by holes punched in special cards or paper tape.
Being able to talk to a computer and have it respond in some way remained a dream until some years after the development of the PC. But, by the middle of the 1990′s PC’s were getting powerful enough to run software which allowed the user to talk and have their words appear on the screen. Several computer companies got on the bandwagon, including IBM with their Via Voice. Another entry in the field was Dragon Naturally Speaking, which was developed not only allow voice input, but to allow the user virtually to control the computer by voice. All these programs were for Intel-based PCs running under Microsoft Windows. Shortly after this a firm called MacSpeech developed a voice input program to run on the Apple Macintosh.
As the years passed some of these programs faded out of the scene. Voice input was a specialist, and rather niche market. It wasn’t, of course, limited to use by the disabled. It also had a strong market in fields like law and medicine where it allowed the user to dictate their notes and have them appear on a computer without having to use a specialist stenographer. Whether this was a good thing, or a bad thing, in the opinion of the secretaries and stenographers who had previously typed up the notes I leave the reader to imagine.