Newsgroups: comp.speech
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!howland.reston.ans.net!ix.netcom.com!netcom.com!daphne
From: daphne@netcom.com (Daphne Gould)
Subject: Re: I'm ready to buy...
Message-ID: <daphneD5tDwH.AJo@netcom.com>
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References: <3kk90e$rv4@newsgate.dircon.co.uk>
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 1995 23:43:29 GMT
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In article <3kk90e$rv4@newsgate.dircon.co.uk>,
Brian McGinty <mcgintyb@tdc.dircon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>I've been reading comp.speech and comp.dsp about 2 months.  I've read the
>faq and I'm ready to buy.
>
>What I'ld like to do:
>I want to use a speech recognition system for writing.  Just for myself, 
>so speaker dependent, continuous speech seems what I need.
>
>I also want to record my own speech into a tape recorder for when I am 
>not around the computer, and play it in later.
>
>Accurate punctuation and page formatting is not critical, I can handle
>that from the keyboard without too much hassle.  The speech portion will
>be for the bulk import of large amounts of words.
>
>I want to bring the whole thing in for US$3000 or less.  Right now I'm
>using a 468DX50, 8 megs RAM, and about 60 megs free on the drive.  For
>maximum performance, if required,  I'll go upgrade to Pentium, more RAM,
>bigger disk, etc.  I'll use whatever operating system required (DOS,
>Windows, OS2 etc.)  If the reason is extremely compelling I suppose I 
>could spring for a used DEC Alpha or other esoteric platform.
>

---
To the best of my knowledge, there are no commercial continuous speech 
dictation systems currently available.  Phillips has announced a 
near-real-time system although it is not available yet and the 
preliminary indications are that it will be very expensive (perhaps as 
much as or more than an order of magnitude above your target).

Of the other commercial dictation systems, all currently use discrete 
speech and none claim to be able to take recorded input (you have to 
dictate live to all of them).  The three commercially available dictation 
systems for PC class machines are:

DragonDictate from Dragon Systems
IBM VoiceType Dictation from IBM Corp.
Kurzweil Voice from Kurzweil AI
---

>Question 1:  From my reading it seems that recognition is not especially  
>computation intensive or disk drive intensive.  Would my best investment
>be in massive amounts of RAM?  64Megs?
>

---
Speech recognition is extremely computational intensive.  DragonDictate 
for DOS will run on a high-end 386 and DragonDictate for Windows will run on 
a low-end 486, but the faster the processor the better.

Also, speech recognition is very RAM intensive.  We recommend a 16MB 
system for running DragonDictate for Windows along with one of the memory 
hungrey compercial word processors (although you can get by with as 
little as 10MB if you have to).

Disk usage is not usually an issue compare to any significant software 
package (i.e. a few tens of megabytes depending on version).
---

>...
>
>Question 2:  Is there some custom hardware I'm not familiar with?   
>Could I put together a custom system with my own DSP chips, support
>hardware, public file libraries and light programming? I'm pretty
>sure I could bread board a system just from a schematic and a 
>parts list.
>

---
You could probably figure out how to do this to put together a command 
and control (small vocabulary system) but for a full dictation system, 
you are better off buying one of the commercial products.
---

>...
>
>Question 4: Is this an active, growing system?  Does the company constantly
>improve the product?  It seems to me the Covox product has been unchanged
>for years.  As far as company commitment goes, Dragon Systems seems to
>have the largest advertising presence.
>

---
Dragon Systems is committed to developing and marketting the best PC-base 
speech recognition products.  To that end, we have a very large research 
department working on new speech recognition algorithms and a large 
development group working on turning this technology into products.
---

>...

Sorry for not answering all the questions in the original message.

Joel Gould
Dragon Systems
joelg@dragonsys.com

