Many Dragon NaturallySpeaking users choose to use the Rainbow Passage printed below to measure their accuracy. They use this because it contains all the phonemes in the English language. What is a phoneme? A phoneme is the smallest contrastive unit in the sound system of a languageThis is how you would do it.

1. Copy the Rainbow passage into a new Word document and save it on your PC.
2. With Dragon running, whenever you want to check your accuracy, say “open Microsoft Word”
3. Say “File”, then “Open” and then open your Rainbow Passage Word file
4. Either print it out for reference or have it on screen to refer to
5. Then just dictate the passage speaking clearly and steadily
6. Using the Word highlighting tool, colour highlight the mistaken words (A)
7. Then count the total words in the original Rainbow Passage text  – “Tools”, ”word count” (B)
8. Calculate percentage accuracy as follows:-% accuracy = (B – A)/B x 100%

It’s a good idea to check your accuracy from time to time to confirm that Dragon is better able to recognise your dictation as time goes on.

The Rainbow Passage

When sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act like a prism and form a rainbow. The rainbow is a division of white light into many beautiful colors. These take the shape of a long round arch, with its path high above, and its two ends apparently beyond the horizon. There is, according to legend, a boiling pot of gold at one end. People look, but no one ever finds it. When a man looks for something beyond his reach, his friends say he is looking for a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Throughout the centuries men have explained the rainbow in various ways. Some have accepted it as a miracle without physical explanation. To the Hebrews it was a token that there would be no more universal floods. The Greeks used to imagine that it was a sign from the gods to foretell war or heavy rain. The Norse men consider the rainbow as a bridge over which the gods passed from Earth to their home in the sky. Other men have tried to explain the phenomena physically. Aristotle thought that the rainbow was caused by a reflection of the sun’s rays by the rain. Since then physicists have found that it is not reflection, but refraction by the raindrops which causes the rainbow. Many complicated ideas about the rainbow have been formed. The difference in the rainbow depends considerably upon the size of the water drops, and the width of the colored band increases as the size of the drops increases. The actual primary rainbow observed is said to be the effect of super position of a number of bows. If the red of the second bow falls upon green of the first, the result is to give a bow with an abnormally wide yellow band, since red and green lights when mixed formed yellow. This is a very common type of bow, one showing mainly red and yellow, with little or no green or blue.

In a previous article, I talked about the fact that with version 9 of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, you don’t have to be tethered to your desk as version 9 now supports Bluetooth headsets. I have looked into what is avaialble and I would like to tell you what my reccomendation is.

Speech Empowered Computing is pleased to offer the XCommunicator 5 bluetooth wireless microphone for use with Dragon NaturallySpeaking priced at £145 + delivery + VAT

This microphone was certified by Nuance in July 2006 for use with Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Read the rest of this entry »

The Dragon NaturallySpeaking tour bus visited the North West yesterday (22nd October) coming to Stretford in Manchester. I visited to join Simon Howard, Marketing Director of Nuance UK, and Mike Strawson of Compliant UK who were demonstrating speech recognition to interested users.

Tour bus outside PC World, Stretford, Manchester             The “Dragon” greets visitors!

The venue was close to the Manchester United football ground and many thousands of football fans were out on the street for the Manchester United versus Liverpool football match.

The day was quite successful with a steady stream of visitors eager to learn about speech recognition with Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Simon and Mike started by saying how the software had improved over the years and that with the latest release of version 9, high levels of accuracy and response were possible with the minimum of setup. They went on to review the benefits of Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 9 with the visitors and gave a demonstration of the software using the Plantronics wireless microphone which ships with the Preferred and Professional 9 wireless versions. The demonstration covered the creation of a Word document including automatic insertion of graphics, capitalisation, bulleting, formatting, insertion of boiler plate text etc. Simon and Mike proved the capabilities of the software by inviting the viewer to select an article at random from the Newspaper. The software dealt with this challenge admirably! They clearly showed how Dragon NaturallySpeaking is taking over from the 130 years old technology of the computer keyboard.

It was fascinating to see the reactions of everyone to the power of the demonstration. Everyone was clearly impressed and most took away an information pack. It was clear from the day that many people (who are not trained typists) have to rely on themselves to create a lot of documents in their Businesses and Organisations and feel constrained by the limitations of having to type up everything slowly on the keyboard. By the level of interest shown, Dragon NaturallySpeaking was the solution they were looking for!

Here are some photographs which give an impression of the day.

Simon demonstrates Dragon NaturallySpeaking on a large screen “without wires” using his wireless headset

Mike and Simon help potential users with their questions about Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

At the end of the day, the tour bus headed south for the last day of an extremely successful tour which will be in Kingston on 27th October. If you’d like to visit, the details are here:-

http://nuance.co.uk/naturallyspeaking/bus/

Peter Maddern

Speech Empowered Computing

Keep an eye open here

http://www.nuance.com/news/webinars/

for some interesting Nuance Webinars on Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Read the rest of this entry »

Whilst evaluating a new microphone today with a new user file, I took the opportunity to make some accuracy checks after making changes to my user file as described below. Out of interest, I thought I would post the results here.

I read a 166 word passage from Bill Bryson’s book “Notes from a Small Island”. Results:- Read the rest of this entry »