Typists can sleep easy for now.
The price of speech-recognition is certainly coming down, but the time and effort to make it work efficiently will bring most back to the keyboard.
Several years ago a senior executive I know who cannot type and will not learn to type got one of the first speech-recognition software packages. It cost several thousand dollars. He still calls for shorthand secretaries.
I have been trying IMSI’s latest offer of Dragon speech-recognition software. I retails for an astonishingly low $89.95, compared to prices a few years ago.
I found it too slow to be of practical use. Maybe because the software starts on the premise of an American accent which requires laborious re-education.
My “”Choose one” came up as Tucson (Arizona, that is). Text IMSI-Dragon typed from my speech contained an unacceptable error rate. Sure, the software provides easy correction which the software remembers so that the same utterance produces the new corrected word next time, but I found myself at first correcting virtually every word.
No doubt that with a lot of training and perhaps a lot of extra memory to make it go faster, the software could be made to learn one person’s voice well enough to be workable, but my guess is that it would be easy to learn to type. Further anyone who already types passably simply will not bother.
The IMSI software is designed to let you give commands to software so you can run your computer as well as type text. This seems to me to be an added complication.
Speech-recognition software developers should forget the ideal of running a computer and printing spotless text. Rather they should get the software to type substantially what the user is saying in a word-processor (forget spreadsheet and other software), leaving the user to control the computer, spell-check, proof read, format and top and tail.
Voice-recognition software must deal with chunks of text and you should be able to pick up the software, do one 15-minute session with a set text to train the software.
This software required more patience than I have.