Quadzila@optonline.net
03-01-2007, 02:47 PM
Great article by David Pogue, check it out at http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/
Lizbv
03-01-2007, 02:55 PM
Thank you- for the article
Quadzila, thanks!
Excellent article by David Pogue.
Microsoft Vista to silence IBM ViaVoice, Nuance
By Fernando Cassia: Thursday 31 August 2006, 13:05
SOFTWARE BEHEMOTH Microsoft plans to include speech recognition in Windows Vista. Who will buy products like IBM's Viavoice or Nuance's "Dragon Naturally Speaking" if dictation and voice navigation becomes "an integral part of the OS"?
This is one of several questions I have pondered, after watching a local demo of Vista's speech recognition and dictation which gave me a serious case of deja vu, as IBM was doing this ten years ago with OS/2 Warp 4 and its built-in VoiceType dictation. It took the Microsoft Vole only 10 years to "innovate" this to the market. I have to say that the product worked quite well, and with continuous speech, which certainly shows Microsoft has used the money from the OS proloads and MS Office cash cows quite well in these last ten years.
The main question I had was: is Microsoft "doing a Netscape" on both Nuance's Dragon and IBM's Viavoice products? In other words, how can these companies compete on desktop dictation software if the feature is "integrated" into the OS? To me, it's just like watching "IE vs Netscape" all over again. You can argue all day about the superiority of each of these established voice engines compared to Microsoft's new offering, but in the end, the odds are against them. In the words of the NY Times' David Pogue: "consumers aren't actually choosing Internet Explorer; in fact, they're not choosing. They just use what came on their Windows computers".
the Inquirer (http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=34072)