Product ReviewsUtilities
You talk, it types. It sounds a simple claim, but this kind of software - true continuous speech dictation - has taken an extraordinarily long time to appear on the Mac. Earlier this year, IBM's ViaVoice, available on the PC for the past two and a half years, was finally released for the Mac. There was a delay before the UK-native version was released, so we looked at the US edition (Reviews, Vol 16 No 4, p26) to see what we could expect. Now IBM has released the UK version of ViaVoice Millennium Edition, so was the wait worth it? ViaVoice is a true continuous speech recognition program. This kind of software requires personal training to be able to recognise an individual user's voice accurately. It also needs a very large dictionary and the ability to distinguish words based on context. The UK edition of ViaVoice for the Mac has a larger primary dictionary than the US version:100,000 words as opposed to 64,000. This includes a wide range of names and words not commonly found in traditional dictionaries, but required for everyday conversation, such as politicians' names - it recognises Mo Mowlam, and correctly spells Steven Norris and Stephen Day - and UK place names with misleading pronunciations such as Somerset, Tyne and Wear and so on. It also understands UK currency (and the euro, if you're interested), and 'full stop' is used instead of the over-American 'period' for ending a sentence. IBM has taken localisation very seriously indeed, and the result is a product which really understands the way the English language works in the UK. The all-important training involves reading one or more prepared texts. ViaVoice listens to the way the user reads the words, then builds a voice model from the results. The user's end of the basic training can be completed in as little as 10 minutes,
Once the voice model is complete, you can just dive in and teach ViaVoice about unusual words as you go, or you can ask ViaVoice to analyse existing copies of your own work. The software sifts through nominated text files looking for words it doesn't recognise, listens to the way the user pronounces them one by one, and adds them to the user's own dictionary. When switching from other applications to ViaVoice, or even just between different parts of the ViaVoice software, we noticed a delay as the software prepared itself for dictation again. However, apart from this glitch, it performed very well on all our test Macs, including a Bondi Blue iMac. ViaVoice uses its own text-editing application, IBM SpeakPad, for the actual dictation; you can't just start dictating into your own applications. But to make life easy, there are ready-made 'transfer to' voice shortcuts for moving your work into one of a number of popular applications. Just say, 'Transfer to Microsoft Word', and a new Word document will be made and your dictation automatically pasted in. There are shortcuts for transferring to Outlook Express, Netscape Communicator and America Online (AOL) as email, and Microsoft Word and AppleWorks as word-processing data. Most of these commands worked flawlessly first time, but ViaVoice had trouble spotting 'Transfer to AppleWorks' as a specific command. Editing commands such as these or making new ones isn't possible, and ViaVoice for the Mac isn't capable of running full-blown speech commands to control anything but SpeechPad. According to IBM, future versions will be able to do more, but for now it concentrates on what it does best - typing what you say. Custom macros for inserting chunks of text are allowed, so dropping in your address can be a matter of saying: 'Insert my address.' Macros can contain up to 30K of text each, which should be enough for almost anyone. There's no doubt that ViaVoice works and, with training, it works very well indeed: this review was dictated after only an hour or so of tuning. If you already type well, ViaVoice won't dramatically increase your text entry speed, although with practice it should match it. If you don't like using a keyboard - either because of RSI or lack of practice - ViaVoice can change the way you use your Mac. By Keith Martin
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