dictation software. Mostly.

[jadelennox]

Dragon NaturallySpeaking very helpfully has the command "shut down the computer", which cleanly closes out of NaturallySpeaking, save your user files, waits until NaturallySpeaking has exited, and then shuts the computer down.

Except.

Periodically, NaturallySpeaking wants to ask you a question during shutdown. Like "would you like to allocate more space to the Acoustic Optimizer?" Something like that. And every time, it turns off the microphone FIRST. It doesn't ask you the question until it has already disabled the microphone. Which means every time it does that, I need to plug in my keyboard and answer the question manually.

This isn't the only way in which NaturallySpeaking forgets that some of the people using the software are using it hands-free entirely. When you run an upgrade, for example, it has to do a certain amount of data gathering: asking the user questions about the system. But instead of doing that BEFORE it disables the old version, it first makes you quit out of the old version and then starts asking question about serial number and installation location. Yes, I understand that using the standard ordering provided by InstallShield (or whatever software package they are using) is easier than doing something non-standard. But Nuance, think about your users. We are using our computers with our voices. If you can change the order of prompts just a tiny bit so that the microphone is ON when you ask us questions, do you realize what a difference that would make our lives?

(Answer: no. The NaturallySpeaking developers who turn up on forms and bulletin boards make it clear that they think nobody is using the product hands-free. There are features I use hands-free which the documentation specifically says can't be used that way.)

Comments

[codeman38]

My girlfriend has been trying out Windows Vista's voice recognition. It works pretty well hands-free, except for one little issue.

Her surname sounds, at least to Windows, like a command to start a program that requires administrative permissions.

And of course, the User Account Control window doesn't support voice input for security reasons.

And no, there's no way to disable running that command via voice.

[jadelennox]

That's interesting, thanks. I've been meaning to try Windows Speech Recognition now that I have Windows 7, because I've heard it's pretty good.

That's a terrible feature -- not supporting voice input for security reasons. In naturally speaking, I have the problem that my boss's name sounds exactly like a common English word and NaturallySpeaking always hears it wrong. So I've actually had to make a new word in my vocabulary called "name [her name]", because it's the only way it even has a chance of getting it right.

[softestbullet]

Oh, geez. >:(

[jadelennox]

Yah, seriously!

[aveleh]

I fail at reading where entries are posted. But laskhjalsjdslakjasdlfhsd that is so.... why on earth would the testers for this software be given keyboards and mice?

[pne]

Given this:

The NaturallySpeaking developers who turn up on forms and bulletin boards make it clear that they think nobody is using the product hands-free.

I'm guessing that they consider it primarily a tool for taking dictation of notes, messages, and letters, with the ability to control other aspects of the system (launching programs, etc.) an afterthought. So their expected audience would use keyboard and/or mouse for everything except dictating texts.

[jadelennox]

I suspect you are correct. They have medical and legal versions, so I think they think of the tool as primarily marketed towards doctors and lawyers who don't want to pay for secretaries. Which I have to say, crazy. I know it's been a strong market of theirs forever, so people must do it, but there's no way this is as easy as dictating to a secretary.

[jadelennox]

I'm guessing that pne is probably correct. It's really depressing.

[jesse_the_k]

that just because people who want choices might be the biggest audience, they're not the *standard* for measurement.

spot fuckin' on.

eat you own dogfood, as the techies so inelegantly say.

[jadelennox]

I don't understand people who don't use the software that they write. Although as I recall, for about the first five or 10 years of their existence, Microsoft use neither Microsoft exchange nor the Microsoft Web browser. I can't remember what they used for e-mail, but I'm pretty sure they used Apache.

[bensanaz]

I don't know about the current team working on it, but my father was on the original development team for Naturally Speaking and back then disabled users were considered one of the primary markets. The product has apparently changed hands four times since those days and the original Dragon employees are no longer on the team, so I suspect that whoever has it now just decided that medical transcription was a more profitable market.

I don't have any useful advice, I just think it's kind of sad. My father was excited about the potential of Naturally Speaking to let people use computers who wouldn't be able to without it, and it's disappointing that its current owners don't seem to care about that.