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.
Dragon Naturally Speaking steadily evolved as computers on which it was running evolved. MacSpeech had to reinvent itself when Apple computers switched from using proprietary chips to using Intel components instead. The software was rewritten, now called MacSpeech Dictate and serves the same purpose on the Apple computers. That and Dragon are the only two survivors in the voice input realm these days. A year or two back MacSpeech bought a licence to use the same speech interpretation engine as was used in Dragon. Then MacSpeech were bought out by Nuance, the software company also now behind Dragon, meaning that both voice input products are owned by the same company, although they still have separate software development teams.
Both products are powerful, and efficient, at their core skill, which is translating spoken words into print on the computer. Dictate is, perhaps, a little more limited in this field, then it has not had nothing like so long to develop as has Dragon. Dragon also is superior in that it still allows complete control of the computer by voice, not just the translation of voice input. Of course the two programs are not in competition, because they work on completely different platforms.
By David O Smith