Hello,

 

I suffer from multiple sclerosis and as a result, I find that the kind
of fluid, rapid speech that is required (although the publishers of it
normally say permitted) by continuous speech recognition systems, all
but impossible.  ?They? are very fond of boasting about how fast and
continuously you can speak but conveniently (for them) forget that you
have to speak fast and continuously in order to use them.

Many years ago now, I used a discrete system called Dragon Dictate. 
This was a discrete system and I could get on with the thing quite
well.  I recently (a few months ago) tracked down and bought ?at a
ridiculous price- a copy.  BUT IT WILL NOT RUN ON MY WINDOWS XP
HOME(service pack one but not service pack two).  My very skilled
computer engineer friend told me that service pack two is dodgy and
can block access to peripherals (amongst other problems).  He knows
his job and so I believe him.  He tells me that the reason why the
Dragon Dictate will not run would be that (on account of its age) it
is written for an 8 bit or a 16 bit operating system and that it is
incompatible with the 32 bit Windows XP home.

 

Have you any suggestions in order to make it run?  Is there a patch? 
Is there another discrete system discrete system that will run on
Windows XP home?

 

Yours sincerely,

 

yaffle, Waltham Abbey, Essex, England.

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Request for Question Clarification by sublime1-ga on 23 Feb 2006 11:16 PST

yaffle...

Are you familiar with the Program Compatability Wizard in XP?
See this page from SanDiegoBizMart.com:
http://www.sandiegobizmart.com/software/xp_users.htm

Let me know where this takes you...

sublime1-ga

---

Clarification of Question by yaffle-ga on 24 Feb 2006 00:43 PST

Hello, sublime,

Thanks for the thought (of using the program compatibility wizard).  I
have however already tried it though - and it does not work.  I too
thought that it might.  There seems to be a compatibility issue at
more fudamental level.

The wizard, by the way, gives a warning that it won't work for some
kinds of program.

Hi yaffle

there is a thread here that may be of some use:
http://www.edc.org/spk2wrt/hypermail/5197.html

You may know more about this than I, but I think recognizing
continuous speech is a harder problem than recognizing discrete
speech, so a program that can recognize continuous speech is likely to
be able to recognize discrete speech too.  That is, you may not
necessarily need specialized discrete-speech recognition
software--pauses between words should help the software, not confuse
it.  You might consider Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which the
manufacturer says runs on Windows XP.

Hello elfn,

Thanks for your thoughts.  I have however at various times bought
Naturally Speaking.  version5 (old 2000)works a little but version8
does not for me at all.
As I understand it - (not well admittedly)there are two kinds of clue
that the software uses in continuous systems - acoustic data from the
mike and syntax data from the program's "knowledge" of in this case
English.  The latter, I believe tells the software whether it should
look for a noun or a verb, or whatever, in the sound it is hearing. 
For this to work, a string of words must be said in one burst.  If
continuos systems don't get these clues, they can't run at all.

Discrete systems use only th acoustic data and will therefore take
words just one st a time if required.  (They do however confuse
homophones.)

It would seem that version 9 is totally dependant on syntax(language)
data whereas 5 can JUST get by without it.

PS.Sorry efn, I got your screen name wrong and called you elfn.

The "version9" in the last-but-one-line should be "version 8".  My
hands were tired and I hit the wrong key.

Hi yaffle,

I don't think the software works as you describe.  With discrete
speech, it has the problem of matching words to a dictionary, where
the word boundaries are defined by the speaker's pauses.  There is no
reason why it can't use syntactic or semantic information if it is
sophisticated enough to have that information.  Probably the very
first speech recognition programs dealt only with phonetics and so
didn't spell English correctly.  Matching to an English dictionary
would be an improvement, and after that, using syntactical information
would be a further improvement.

With continuous speech, the software has all the same problems, plus
the problem of distinguishing word boundaries.  Of course, syntactic
information can help here, but it is not necessarily required.  For
example, if the program has the words "what" and "goes" in its
dictionary and no word that sounds like "watgoes," it can conclude
that the sound "watgoes" corresponds to the two words "what" and
"goes" without reference to any syntactic information.

So I think syntactic information can be used to improve performance in
the recognition of either discrete or continuous speech, and it is not
inextricably linked to either.

All this is based on general knowledge of software and linguistics,
not any inside information about these products.  It is certainly
possible that you are right about Dragon NaturallySpeaking
specifically.

Unfortunately, all this theoretical speculation doesn't do you any
good if you have tried a program and it didn't work for you.  In
researching this question, I found that there are dealers who
specialize in this kind of software.  Maybe one of them could help
you.  There were also some suggestions in the thread that
hardtofindbooks-ga linked.

Good luck,

--efn

Thank you efn, it seems that I was indeed labouring under a
misapprehension as to how the two different kinds of speech
recognition work.  My understanding of that has been improved, but, as
you say, I have still got the problem of getting that software to run.
 I will see how I get on with the specialist dealers as you suggest -
and I'll let you know how I get on.

Hello again, efn,

Ther have been developments.  Dyslexic.com - or rather IANSYST from
whom I did in fact buy this incredibly expensive Dragon Dictate in the
first place, have in response to my email decided free(!)to try and
get my Dragon Dictate working for me by remotely operating my computer
from their place.  They are going to set up the link at 12:00 am
tomorrow - so watch this space.  We will see if they have better luck
than me.  I'll believe it when I see it!  I am not that incompetent.
Earlier today, they spent about an hour on the phone with me trying,
without success, to get it going.

Hello,

I said that I would keep you informed about the "state of play" and so here goes:

IANSYST could not get "remote assistance" to run on THEIR computer and
so yesterday's session was another 100% useless and VERY tedious
"talking me thtough it on the phone" session.  I am fed up.  The
Dragon Dictate cost about £200 and still will not run.  I think that
the company are morally obliged to send one of their technicians to
get it running - and if they can't, then to give me my money back.  I
must have been mad to buy it.  I was too knackered to type this
yesterday, by the way.

sincerely,

Yaffle.

Further to yesterday's comment fom me:

  As they could not make the software run, IANSYST are going to give
me, freely,  my money back.  They are good people.  The CD is in the
post and I am going to close the question now.