May 2002 NGTVoice

  1. Dragon NaturallySpeaking Research Paper on Use with Schoolchildren
  2. Telex S. R. 8400 USB Microphone
  3. Dragon NaturallySpeaking Training Hack
  4. Removing Microsoft Speech
  5. Imaging Technologies From Scansoft
  6. Charactell iREAD Notes Pro
  7. Dragon NaturallySpeaking Training CD by Dan Newman
  8. NGT VoicePro Computer Systems

Dragon NaturallySpeaking Research Paper on Use with Schoolchildren

Over the last several years many educators working in the field of special education have looked for documentation regarding the practical aspects of implement think speech recognition, particularly for use with individuals with learning disabilities. Craig Stuve recently posted an excellent review of implementation strategies and use of speech recognition technology within the public school environment (with permission.).

Telex S. R. 8400 USB Microphone

Due to the supply shortage of the Andrea 7100 USB microphone, we recently had occasion to use the Telex S. R. 8400 USB microphone. I've not seen a USB headset microphone that I've liked better than this one (including the Andrea ANC 700). The fit and finish of this device is excellent, it is very lightweight, and has some of the best throughput capabilities that we've observed in any USB microphone. It also seems to be less prone to the disappearing USB connection syndrome that I see with many USB technologies-for those of you that use USB input devices I'm sure you've seen the phenomenon where the device stop being recognized by the operating system and needs to be unplugged and read plug and in order to be recognized. While this can be a minor annoyance for a more experienced user, this can be real problem for beginner who does not understand why Dragon NaturallySpeaking or other speech recognition software is not recognizing their words any longer. This USB microphone has a list price of $119.00, comes highly recommended, and we're not having any distribution problems acquiring this technology.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking Training Hack

We were recently working with a student who was having difficulties initializing the General Training module in Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I had the opportunity to contact technical support about this problem, and they were kind enough to provide the following .INI file modification in order to reduce the necessary training time required by Dragon NaturallySpeaking. This .INI file modification is not supported by ScanSoft, and may or may not work on every computer system. However, I thought this would be useful to have a toolkit of those professionals that work with individuals with articulation problems that may or may not be able to complete the entire General Training module.

Training Data Needed For Transacc=60000
(the parameter is in milliseconds so the above would cut it down to one minute)

If that doesn't work, try putting the enx prefix in front of it. If that still doesn't work, then it doesn't work.

Removing Microsoft Speech

Many of our clients are aware that Microsoft has included a speech input component in the Microsoft Office 2000 and subsequent Office software. It is our recommendation for those of you using Dragon NaturallySpeaking or IBM ViaVoice that you do not install this module on your computer if you're installing your copy of Microsoft Office. If Office has already been installed it is our recommendation that you do not initialize the Microsoft speech component. Doing so can create significant difficulties for other speech recognition software packages loaded on the computer (although Microsoft has publicly stated that they do not want to interfere with third party vendor speech recognition technologies). For those of you that might have inadvertently initialize the Microsoft speech component, and are now experiencing subsequent problems with your speech input utilities I am including removal instructions for eliminating the Microsoft speech from your computer. If this does not work, a more extensive removal process involves editing the registry to remove the speech component. (Note: should you have an organizational need to experiment with Microsoft speech technologies we recommend that this be undertaken on a test computer that does not have other speech technologies installed. If you need additional information about this component, please feel free to drop me an e-mail.)

Disabling MS Speech Recognition:

  1. Click Start > Settings > Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs.
  2. Select Office XP or MS Word
  3. Click Change
  4. Choose Add or Remove Features
  5. Click the plus box next to Office Shared Features
  6. Click the plus box next to Alternative User Input
  7. Select Speech and choose Not Available
  8. Click Update

Imaging Technologies

You may not be aware that ScanSoft, the new owner of the Dragon core technologies, is also the distributor of OmniPage, OmniForm, and PaperPort. We are now distributing these very exciting digital scanning technologies. I'm going to provide a brief description of each of these technologies so that those of you who are unfamiliar with them may be able to consider using their capabilities:

OmniPage Pro 11-generally regarded as the world's best OCR technology. The OmniPage Pro package includes a unique built-in scheduler feature to do intended batch jobs. OmniPage provides a wizard that performs all of the stages of scanning, reading and saving automatically... or provides you the ability to manually said scan pages, select zones of text and images, and save to an output file. OmniPage can actually save complex multicolumn layouts when sending the output to Microsoft Word.

OmniForm Pro 5.0-easily converts paper forms to electronic format. With a range of intelligent feature sets, this is more than simply OCR conversion. OmniForm gives when the ability to create drop-down lists, specialty fields, and other features that make electronic forms so powerful. In addition, during the conversion process it highlights areas of uncertain conversion in order to bring them to the attention of the human editor. List Price: $545.00 (includes 20 OmniForm client licenses)

PaperPort Deluxe 8.0-PaperPort easily images documents into a digital form using a TWAIN or WIA scanner. Once imaged, these documents can be easily managed and stored either in PaperPort proprietary database for all swear on the hard disk or network. PaperPort has a straightforward interface that makes the software's tools easily accessible. This is accomplished by creating thumbnails of each document that can then be renamed and arranged in folders. It also indexes all text in the metadata and files and provides a search engine for this information. List Price: $99.00

Charactell iREAD Notes Pro

We have started receiving feedback from some of our clients regarding the new iREAD Notes Pro handwriting recognition technology from Charactell (as previously indicated Next Generation Technologies, Inc. is the sole distributor of this technology in North America). Much as with speech recognition, the proprietary OCR technology from Charactell has a strong heuristic (learning) element. This means that with proper use and correction the software gets smarter. In our lab testing, I found that after three documents with proper correction iREAD Notes Pro was making significantly fewer errors than initially. In fact, I particularly appreciated the utility it highlights words were iREAD Notes Pro has a lower certainty of accuracy which easily draws the editors attention to these words for follow-up and correction. This product is a list price of $249.95, but we are offering it for a limited time at $149.95 for single license copies, with site licensing/district licensing available.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking Training CD by Dan Newman

Dan Newman of Say I Can has recently released a three CD set of tutorials for Dragon NaturallySpeaking. This software covers everything from installation and initial training, through correction process and improving accuracy--while covering all of the basic feature sets associated with the Dragon NaturallySpeaking software. We've received excellent feedback from clients using this training software. The price lists at $99.95 and we are providing it to school districts/educators at $90.95.

NGT VoicePro Computer Systems

We recently revised our NGT VoicePro speech optimize computer system specifications. We are using and MSI 645 motherboard which supports DDR 266/333 RAM. In addition, the motherboard supports 512 K cache. In addition, we've started using the Intel Pentium 42.2 GHz processor. This may be the best platform we've ever developed for speech recognition input and voice output technologies. Particularly harnessing Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 6.0 Professional technology we have observed a much faster throughput and overall response time and improved accuracy. We've also been able to keep our price points comparable to previous NGT VoicePro Computer systems so that our customers will be able to get improved performance without having to increase their technology expenditures.

We wish all our friends and clients a safe and happy Memorial Day holiday and look forward to being of service to you in the coming months.

Ed Rosenthal and the staff at NGT Inc.

Page Last Updated: Sunday, June 01, 2008

Copyright 1999-2008 Next Generation Technologies Incorporated

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