__F__ollowing in the footsteps of IBM's ViaVoice and Dragon Systems's NaturallySpeaking, Speech Machines's CyberTranscriber promises professionals another way to conduct business on the fly. The Internet-based voice-recognition service lets you dictate a message by phone or computer and have your dictation emailed to you the next day.
If you're a slow typist, a fast talker, on the road with only a dinky palmtop keyboard, or just caught up in the afternoon commute with your cell phone, this could be the ideal mobile solution. After registering at the Speech Machines Web site, you simply dial a toll-free number, punch in your account number and PIN, and start talking.
Your voice message is then encrypted, compressed, and sent over the Net to the company's service center in England. Once there, some heavy-duty proprietary speech-recognition engines pioneered by the British military go to work turning your voice into text, after which proofreaders on the remote Scottish island of Bute check it for accuracy. All this global handshaking can take as little as three hours.
And, for the most part, it works. For my toll-free test run, I dictated the most riveting technical press release I could find. Sure enough, it arrived via email the following day. It wasn't perfect, however. There were question marks and a word missing in the very first sentence (I admit, I was testing the company's speak-as-fast-as-you-like claims, so I might have butchered the Queen's English a little). The word "definitely" came back out of context as "defiantly," so that Scottish proofreader was either having some fun or had nodded off at the wheel.
The service also works with your home PC. If you use the Voice It Worldwide digital dictation machine, which ports into your computer, you can transfer voice files.
Whatever your flavor, speech recognition has come a long way, and CyberTranscriber's service takes it further still.
STREET CRED
Speech Recognition - To Go Dutch Hitmeister
