Using Dragon NaturallySpeaking On A Netbook
Posted on 12 November 2009, at 2:45 pm, by Dan Cohen
- Look Ma, No Hands – Voice Recognition Technology Today
- Getting Started With Dragon NaturallySpeaking Version 10
- Using Dragon NaturallySpeaking On A Netbook
- Scott eVests will fit an iPad!
(This is the third installment of “Look Ma No Hands- Voice Recognition Technology Today”. Once again there is a video at the end of the post showing the process of writing it prior to the physical clean-up that took place after. The video is truly boring but it does give a good sense of the speed, or lack there-of on a netbook.)
Yesterday I did a quick post on setting up Dragon NaturallySpeaking Version 10. It’s a relatively easy process but it does take some time. It was done on a MacBook Pro with a 2.4 or 2.5 GHz processor and 4 GB of RAM. While that wasn’t able to use all of the resources since it was a virtual machine and the computer was also running Mac OSx it still was quite speedy. Better still, because the microphone is as good as it is I didn’t need to use a headset.
This is a quick post simply to show how well you can use Dragon NaturallySpeaking Version 10 on a netbook. I’m actually recording this post using a Toshiba NB205. Even better, once again I’m not using a headset. I’m sitting in front of the computer and speaking. And while I am speaking slower than I normally would and I’m articulating more clearly than I normally do it isn’t totally unnatural for me to speak this way and as you can see it’s capturing all the words quickly and with almost 100% accuracy.
To come clean, however, this particular netbook is a little bit modified. It has 2 GB of RAM and it has a 32 GB SSD drive rather than a spinning drive. Both of those certainly increase the performance of the computer but not so much that it is unusable if it had one gigabyte of RAM and the spinning drive.
The point here is this — here I am with a 2 pounds notebook that’s rather anemic from a power perspective and I don’t need to physically be typing on it. I can simply speak what I want and then after I’m done go back and clean up the text. It isn’t as fast as if I were using a blazing computer and had 100% accuracy but even still it is a far faster process than were I having to type this out using the keyboard.
That’s the end of this quick post but before I close out I would simply point out that if you are using a net book is worth looking into this excellent software.
Addendum- over all the accuracy using the netbook with the built-in mic was not as good as it was on the MacBook Pro. Even still, however, it was better than typing. What was striking to me was that when I went back to listen the quality of the recording was far worse than I expected. On top of that, there is a frequent mechanical noise in the background even though the netbook does not have any moving parts. Rather odd. Still, it worked.
For more information on Dragon NaturallySpeaking, visit the Nuance website.
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December 21st, 2009 at 6:58 pm
As you point out, these results may be better than the average user will find. I just tried running DNS version 9.5 on my asus 1000he (2 gb ram, “spinning” drive) in MSWord. The results were abysmal. While the program ran and worked, the lag was painfully slow and accuracy was about 90% (don't let that number fool you, having to correct 10% is a huge effort!). Based on these results, the setup is slower than simply typing (even on this small keyboard). I doubt the poor results are simply due to the lack of a solid state drive… were you using Word or the Dragon pad I wonder? In any case, in my view this is one example where Netbooks fall short of the mark…