Voice Recognition Software: Comparison and Recommendations :: essays research papers

Voice Recognition Softw ar Comparison and RecommendationsUse of spokesperson lore softw atomic number 18 is under consideration by medical point administrators nationally. Administrators gather in long searchedfor alternatives to the expense, error rate, and record-completiondelays associated with conventional transcription. It is no wonderthat, with the upstart advances in voice apprehension software, medicaltransciptionists are looking at this emerging technology as a powerfulway of accomplishing inborn record-keeping tasks.This report investigates four of the leading voice recognitionapplications to determine whether this technology has become apractical option and to determine which application is the beaverchoice. And so that this report and further study of the software canbe better understood, an introduction to the subject of voicerecognition software follows.presentation to Voice Recognition TechnologySeveral different voice recognition products currently exist in t hemarketplace, and viable choices are greater in number than they wereonly a few years ago. Rapid changes have been fueled by theever-increasing power and plummeting prices of desktop systems. Thoughroom for improvement still exists, accuracy has advanced tremendouslyin a spectacularly short time.Brief history. The starting signal software-only dictation product for PCs,Dragon Systems DragonDictate for Windows 1.0, development discrete obstetrical deliveryrecognition technology, was released in 1994. Discrete expression is aslow, unnatural means of dictation, requiring a pause after each and every(prenominal) word 11. Two years later, IBM introduced the first continuous quarrel recognition software, its MedSpeak/Radiology. These systemsoften had five-figure price tags and required very expensive PCs.Continuous speech technology allows its users to speak naturally andconversationally, relieving practically of the tedium of discrete speechdictation 11.Dragon Systems made an enor mous stride in June, 1997, when it releasedNaturallySpeaking, the first general-purpose continuous speechsoftware program. Much more affordable than earlier programs, itbrought the realm of continuous speech recognition to a much widerrange of users. Two months later, IBM released its competingcontinuous speech software, ViaVoice 10.Stringent demands. Much is demanded of speech recognition programs.Accuracy is critical, and speed is essential to any effective program.Added to these challenges are the enormous variance that exists amongindividual human speech patterns, pitch, rate, and inflection. Thesevariations are an odd test of the flexibility of anyprogram. Voice recognition follows these steps utter words enter a microphone.Audio is elegant by the computers start card.The software discriminates between lower-frequency vowels andhigher-frequency consonants and compares the results with phonemes,the smallest building blocks of speech. The software then comparesresults to grou ps of phonemes, and then to actual words, determiningthe most likely match.Contextual information is simultaneously processed in order to moreaccurately predict words that are most likely to be used next, such as