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

Voice Recognition Software Comparison and RecommendationsUse of voice recognition software is under consideration by medical agency administrators nationally. Administrators have long searchedfor alternatives to the expense, error rate, and record-completiondelays associated with conventional transcription. It is no wonderthat, with the recent advances in voice recognition software, medicaltransciptionists are looking at this emerge technology as a powerfulway of accomplishing essential 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 bestchoice. And so that this report and further study of the software canbe better understood, an introduction to the posit of voicerecognition software follows.Introduction to Voice Recognition TechnologySeveral different voice recognition products currently exist in themarketplace, and feasible 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 stunningly short time.Brief history. The first software-only dictation product for PCs,flying lizard Systems DragonDictate for Windows 1.0, using discrete speechrecognition technology, was released in 1994. Discrete speech is aslow, unnatural means of dictation, requiring a pause after each and each word 11. Two years later, IBM introduced the first day-and-nightspeech 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 much of the tedium of discrete speechdictation 11.Dragon Systems made an enormous stride in June, 1997, when it releasedNaturallySpeaking, the first general -purpose free burning 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 gentle speech patterns, pitch, rate, and inflection. Thesevariations are an extraordinary test of the flexibility of anyprogram. Voice recognition follows these stepsSpoken words enter a microphone.Audio is tasteful by the computers sound 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 groups of phonemes, and then to actual words, determiningthe most like ly match.Contextual information is concurrently processed in order to moreaccurately predict words that are most likely to be used next, such as