To the best of my knowledge, my grandmother never put on the headset at all. The software took dictation from my cousin about as accurately as I might take it from a Slovak. "It'll be worth it." After the training was over, though, he put the program through its pace and disappointment set in.
"You have to train the program," he told me. When I came back thirty minutes later, he was still at it. The next day, I found one of my cousins at the computer, headset on, reading aloud a passage from Mark Twain. This particular package came with a headset microphone and required lengthy training. "Oh," she said again, and set the box aside. Her e-mails contained sentences that started out well enough before devolving into a mishmash of symbols, numbers, and letters, before wandering back to sense again like a pilgrim returned home after a lengthy journey. My grandmother, though the best of women in ways too numerous to count, never learned to type during her many years on the farm, and the "delete" key perpetually eluded her. "Oh," she said in some confusion, "what is this?" One of her children explained that this was a voice recognition program-she could use it to dictate her AOL e-mails without having to hunt and peck her way across the keyboard.
Let's follow the Spirit of Christmas Past into an Iowa living room 10 years ago, a room in which my 80-year-old grandmother pulled the wrapping from a present and held aloft a cardboard box.
Both were more art than science, both required prayer and a bit of luck, and both failed to work much of the time. Speech recognition and voodoo had much in common during the 1990s. Price: $799Professional ( shop for this title) $199Preferred ( shop for this title) $99Standard ( shop for this title) System requirements: Windows 2000 SP4, Windows XP 1.0GHz Pentium 4, 512MB RAM, 1GB hard drive space
0 kommentar(er)
