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A SAMPLE DICTATION WITH MICROSOFT SPEECH
RECOGNITION
(Version 6.1, available under Office 2003)
Recently, there has been much talk about speech-recognition engines and
similar topics. On the one hand people are very skeptic about the
possibility of dictating to a machine, but on the other hand, because of the
high mystification connected with machines in general and computers in
particular, people believe there is no difficulty in achieving such a goal.
Unfortunately, because of the lack of popularity of dictation, even among
native speakers of the languages for which there are speech recognition
applications available, the industry doesn’t consider it profitable enough to
invest in developing these applications and bringing them to a state where
more and more people would be able to join in and enjoy speaking to their
computers instead of producing texts by typing. In short, this is a vicious
circle from which I see no easy exit. Naturally, most efforts are directed
into manufacturing of products for the English language, while all the
other languages lag considerably behind. Fortunately, however, most of
the other relevant languages have a far simpler sound pattern, which
makes the relevant products highly functional. I am referring mostly to
Italian and Spanish, but I believe that German and perhaps Dutch belong
to this category.
Itamar Even-Zohar
[This text was dictated with Microsoft SR 2003 and Telex M-560
Microphone]