No cure in sight for speech impediments

Hate to type? Who doesn’t.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could plug a microphone into your laptop and dictate a sales presentation or speech directly into a word processor on your next trip?

So why don’t you see more executives discreetly murmuring into their portables on the plane or at the airport? Probably because it’s not practical – at least not yet.

A survey published in last month’s PC magazine found that a majority of readers believe speech recognition has “matured to the point at which it can be useful to mainstream users.” That’s mainstream desktop users, folks.

Don’t bother taking the talking software on the road. I say this not just because most portables run slower and ship with less memory than their big brothers. Speech recognition software like IBM’s ViaVoice, which I recently evaluated, is a memory-munching behemoth that can be as difficult to train as it is to use.

I say it because the act of speaking to a computer while on the go is awkward. The background noise interferes with the program; there’s precious little privacy to input memos or letters and the extra hardware required for such an operation is clunky. ViaVoice wanted to take dictation from my dishwasher instead of from me. Whenever the kitchen utensil sprang into action, the program menu would light up like a Christmas tree, eager to record a spoken word. (The dishwasher said nothing discernable.) When I showed up, clipped the earphone on my head, and began talking, ViaVoice was less cooperative.

I should preface this by noting that I spent the better part of an hour reading to the program so that it could adjust to my speech (American English with none-too-subtle hints of a Southern drawl, California surfer-speak and a German accent.) I felt as if I had invested time and resources into the program, and I desperately wanted it to work.

Slim chance. ViaVoice didn’t recognize my computer’s sound card at first. Then, after rebooting, it decided maybe it would acknowledge the hardware – but only this once. Upon subsequent restarts, the application sometimes played along and sometimes didn’t.

Finally, after successfully calibrating ViaVoice, I decided to take it for a spin on Microsoft Word.

“Hello. Period. This is a test,” I said, articulating each word.

“Hello. That’s assessed,” the program answered.

“Arggh. Scratch that,” I ordered, issuing ViaVoice’s equivalent of a “delete” command.

“Are,” it typed, and then erased the “are” leaving the erroneous “that’s assessed.”

ViaVoice promises a 90 percent accuracy rate, which is kind of like hosting a foreign exchange student: every tenth word or so doesn’t register. I opened an instructional application that helps you to train ViaVoice to interpret individual words and taught it what “this is a test” sounded like when I said it. To its credit, the program learned. But I didn’t have the patience to teach it how I said every last word, nor, as it turns out, did I have the time.

A few days later I experienced a catastrophic and complete system meltdown. I suspect that I had too many big applications like ViaVoice loaded onto my computer, but it might have also been the beta version of Microsoft Office 2000 that I got in a mysterious package from Redmond, Wash. Either way, not so long after my foray into speech recognition, I found myself reformatting my entire hard drive and re-installing my operating system. This takes the better part of an afternoon, for those of you who are fortunate enough to still have your original system.

I’m still in a state of shock.

When I sat down to write this column, I had to recall the anecdote about using ViaVoice with Word from memory, because I haven’t had to guts to reinstall the program. The system snafu also threw a wrench in my plan to review the other voice recognition programs – Dragon Naturally Speaking, Philips FreeSpeech and Typhoon – because I was too chicken to test anything else that tinkered with talk.

It may take our friends at Microsoft, who probably got me into this mess in the first place, to force speech recognition upon us. The rumor mill says it is developing a product code-named Whisper that it may integrate into its Windows 2000 operating system. If that happens, you may see a lot more travelers talking to their laptops in airport lounges, on planes and in hotel lobbies.

Until then, here’s what to do:

If you’ve got a desktop that’s loaded to the hilt with memory and a reasonably fast processor, and you can’t type for some reason, then I’d give ViaVoice a try. Just keep other large applications – and anything with the word “beta” in it – as far away from your computer as possible.

If you want to travel with the talking software, be patient. Give this technology a few more years. It’ll understand you soon enough.

Christopher Elliott is the author of Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals. Critics have called it “eye-opening” and “inspiring” — it’ll “grab your attention and won’t let go.” Order your copy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

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