A Review of Dragon Naturally Speaking 10

A review of Dragon NaturallySpeaking by Nuance

It's easy to be amazed by voice recognition that is even reasonably accurate. It brings us humans one small step closer to being the master over our computer slave. To have the machine perform even the basic tasks that we need performed by using a voice command can be simultaneously frightening and astounding. Visions of Colossus, the Forbin Project might just be right around the corner and voice recognition brings us one step closer to the corner.

This is all a prelude to my review of Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10.

I purchased an earlier version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking many years ago, installed it on my Windows machine, quickly grew tired of its inaccuracies although I was still somewhat amazed that it could perform at all. The newer, faster computers can put to rest many of the power issues the previous computers had. I purchased Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 on sale from buy.com for about $30 including shipping and have been playing with it for the last month or so.

The accuracy of the software is amazing especially considering the low entry price. My initial intent wasn't to review this product. It was to turn a somewhat daunting typing task into a less daunting dictation task.

The product comes in the small cardboard box, most of which packages the included microphone and headset. Herein lies, possibly, the most distasteful part of this product and that is the uncomfortable headset that is included with it. Granted, I have a pretty big head but not so big that an adjustable headset shouldn't accommodate me. If I'm going to be wearing this product for hours on end I need to be able to do it comfortably and without leaving an impression in the side of my head where the microphone and earpiece are stationed. Aside from the comfort factor, the sound quality and the microphone seemed to work quite well. However after wearing it for 20 minutes or so I reverted to my old trusty Plantronics headset and microphone which I can easily keep on my noggin for hours on end.

I installed the software on three different computers; two desktops and a laptop. One of the desktops and the laptop were running windows XP the other desktop was running Vista. All computers have at least four gigs of RAM and plenty of disk space. The first installation was on the Vista machine and this is where I experienced the most trouble installing the product. I attempted installation and it errored out. I re-attempted installation on the Vista machine and it was successful the second time: total installation time was about 30 minutes or so. The installation on the XP desktop and the XP laptop were much easier and installed on the first try without any hiccupping.

Next was the training. I was presented with six or seven 10-minute passages to read; all of them from books of some sort. I chose Dave Barry, Lewis Carroll, and Dilbert on each one of the different machines (I needed to train them all individually) and proceeded to spend approximately 10 or 15 minutes teaching my computer to understand my voice commands. It was actually a rather soothing experience and each computer easily kept up with me.

A usage tutorial is included in the product it's worthwhile going through it. Simple voice commands are presented in the context of creating a test document and spending 15 minutes working with the voice recognition system is time well spent to avoid frustration later on.

I found the most difficult mindset change to be the necessity to think before you speak. This includes usually enunciating punctuation. It strikes me that since your fingers can't really keep up with your brain, for the most part, transferring intelligent thought through a keyboard to the computer tends to be like downshifting a car. Alternatively, the voice recognition system appears to have no problem keeping up with a steady stream of speech and therefore mentally composing your thoughts before you verbally enunciate them can save plenty of time later on where you might need to go back to correct words, phrases, or entire sentences. I suspect this mindset change will be the crux of the matter. Whether I continue to use this product are not will rest on whether I ultimately feel comfortable composing my thoughts mentally well before I enunciate them.

Considering the fact that the product eliminates me pounding on my keyboard for extended periods of time I hope I am able to make this mindset change.

In closing, I'll demonstrate the accuracy of the product by verbalizing a paragraph that I grabbed off the Internet. From Wikipedia I grabbed the following paragraph and will now proceed to verbalize it so that you can compare it to word-for-word:

"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is an English-language pangram (a phrase that contains all of the letters of the alphabet). It has been used to test typewriters and computer keyboards, and in other applications involving all of the letters in the English alphabet. Due to its shortness and coherence, it has become widely known and is often used in visual arts.

And here's my verbalization:

The quick brown jumps over the lazy dog is an English-language pangram open parentheses a phrase that contains all the letters of the alphabet). It has been used to test typewriters and computer keyboards, and other applications involving all of the letters in the English alphabet. Due to its shortness and coherence, it has become widely known and is often used in visual arts.

Just so you know, I didn't verbalize the quotation marks so I won't hold it against the program. Not so with the parentheses statement so I'm not sure why it didn't get (like it did just now).

In summary: Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 is accurate, easy to install and fun to use. If you're at all curious about voice recognition in its current incantation, price should not be the obstacle that keeps you away from this product.

And, yes, I did create this blog entry using the product.

Twitter and customer service

Ppeople who spend any kind of time on the Internet are aware of the social networking system called Twitter. It's become a full part of the acknowledging that many people use on a day-to-day basis while it's a temporary annoyance for other people who haven't figured out how to integrate it into their business lives yet.

Twitter is sometimes difficult to understand until you've used it for a while. Since it's structured 140 characters, you have to think carefully before you add a tweet sincemany if not most things that you'd like to say would take more than 140 characters.

Some companies are openly embracing this technology and it can be pretty easy to find out which companies those are. I recently had a war experience with CitiMortgage. Their monthly envelopes have been hammering me to move my statements to paperless as it turns out I was speaking with a CitiMortgage on the telephone and asked the very pleasant customer service person if she wouldn't mind moving moving me to a paper of a statement. She informed me that although she would like to do this, she was unable to and I needed to log into my account on Citimortgage.com in order to turn my statements paperless.

It certainly seems ironic that, on one hand this enormous company has a desire to stop cutting down trees for their statements and giving me my information in bits as opposed to physical atoms. Technology is such a part of my life, that it would actually be easier for me to read my statements online. Therefore, I did have something to gain by going paperless. But at the same time CitiMortgage with its thousands of employees has something to gain also: there is physical labor involved in printing my statement however slight it may be. It cost them a small amount of money for the paper, the ink, and the labor involved in printing and delivering said statement to me every month so there's something that they can gain by switching that to a simple e-mail.

There's another company that I'd like to mention that seems to be doing the exact opposite. For the last several weeks I've been using with Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 by Nuance. As a matter of fact, I'm dictating this blog entry with that exact product. I could list off some of the pluses and minuses of the Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 later, but for right now I'd like to mention how they're using Twitter to support their customer base.

Upon receiving Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 a few weeks ago, and after playing with it for a few days,I tweeted that I was enjoying the product and was amazed at its accuracy. Within approximately one hour I received a private tweet from Nuance customer service requesting that I alert them to any problems I may have with the product from that point on. I've not experienced any problems that I would need to bring up with customer service, but it's nice to know that there are looking over the shoulder of America to see if people are using their products and making sure that all was going well with them.

This all came about because I went to the local Milwaukee chapter of LikeMinded: a monthly networking group meets at the Rochambeau coffee shop in Milwaukee. One of the attendees was Jamie, an IT geek from Aurora Healthcare in Milwaukee. Jamie related a story about how his company handles problem reports that they find via twitter and I was duly impressed. It's easy to brush off the fact that a healthcare organization might be concerned about customer support but the fact is there a lease trying to understand social networking and have allocated the necessary resources in their organization to respond accordingly. Whether this remains a long-term part of their offerings certainly remains to be seen because some of these social networking systems may eventually dissolve into the ether, but it's encouraging to know that they get it now and feel that it's a communication system important enough to monitor regularly.

Now, if only CitiMortgage would get it,too.

What's going on with Our Next Thing

The Our Next Thing project has been slow-moving as of late. You know it. We know it.

Yes, we've been busy but we've also realized some of our priorities and the Our Next Thing project doesn't always go into the top priority pile. Generally, that is because it's not making money for us so if a moneymaking endeavor comes our way, we often have to put our personal projects on the back burner. That's okay, as long as we're dedicated to coming back to this project, which is definitely still near and dear to our hearts.

We've done a few more interviews in the Milwaukee area, and are now finishing up on the planning for our winter escape from Wisconsin. We will again, be spending two months of our next winter in Asheville North Carolina. Or more accurately, will be spending a month in Asheville and a month in Black Mountain, North Carolina. the two cities are about 15 minutes apart. So we can bounce back-and-forth between the two. We have some friends and acquaintances in both of those cities and are looking forward to seeing them again. We've spent a couple of pleasant days in Black Mountain, so we know basically what we're getting into, but the prospect of spending a month they are is actually starting to get a little exciting. Whereas Asheville tends to be a progressive, liberally oriented city, Black Mountain is a sort of artist colony and the population as probably about a fifth the size of Asheville.

Will be looking for people to interview in both of those cities so if you know of anybody who would like to go under our camera lens, please send them our way. We're looking for people who have made dramatic career changes in their lives and age is quite unimportant. We'll take anybody from their 20s to their 90s as long as their career paths have been diverse.

We also hope to catch up with some of the people that we interviewed at our last trip and see what they've been up to since that time.

I created this blog posting using my new voice recognition system based on Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I'm enjoying the writing ability of this device, but have not totally integrated into my business life. It may be that I need to just work at this thing until it's second nature.

Tough Decisions

I attended my mother's 80th birthday party. Happy Birthday, Mom! I love you!

Both of my parents are alive and, for the most part, doing pretty well; my mother especially. My father is doing ok relative to other 82 year olds. Some are better; some are worse...I think my dad's probably in the middle.

Like many of us, my dad abused his body during his heretofore life. He drank a bit too much, he ate a bit too much and he smoked a bit too much. Some of those things are now, I'm afraid, catching up to him. He did give up smoking some 20 years ago but his drinking took a toll that may be be recoverable. Oh, and he has that "crappy Irish skin" that many in our clan was born with.

I'm one of seven kids; 2nd oldest child and oldest male. Basically, it meant I didn't need to do the dishes while we were growing up (sorry sibs!). So the day before this party, we decided to have a sibling get-together. My sister Amy has a house a town away from the folks and generously offered to host the event (my other sister Bridget lives a few houses away from the folks and was going to host the main party).

So we started eating and drinking and carrying on...until I figured we were all feeling well enough to talk about "where the folks were". This was one of those conversations that nobody really wanted to start but many of us knew we should.

My folks live in the middle of Pennsylvania right on the Susquahanna River. Since flooding is a regular occurance there, they built their house on stilts so that if the water comes up, the stilts will, hopefully, save move of their belongings (and themselves, if needbe). The downside of the stilt system is that a rather steep set of stairs is the only way into the house. Since this part of Pennsylvania sees a goodly amount of snow, my fear is that entering or exiting the house during the winter months could be dangerous.

I stated as much to my siblings and opened the floor for discussion. Several of my sibs shared my fears but, surprisingly, not all of them. Some of them thought that it could be handled safely and my folks could live though the winter without too much difficulty. Others disagreed and thought we (the kids) should act. I do have 2 siblings that live within the same small town as the folks. I'm sure my folks will call them if they need assistance. What to do, what to do?

I'm sharing these details, not so much for the answers that we came up with but for the question: If the folks are fairly coherent, is it the kids responsibility to come up with solutions whether the folks want to abide by them or not? Since it's very reasonable to assume that some of my siblings will be alerted to said difficulties (and since I'm 1200 miles away it won't be me), is it appropriate to ask my folks to let us in on their thoughts and keep us advised on things that could affect any of us?

I had a discussion with my mom about some of these issues and I came away with some new understanding. One, my mom has actually thought some of these issues through. Whereas we were assuming that she was taking a "wait and see" attitude, she has, at least, thought through the "what do I have to do to make this work" thought process and has a grasp on a solution. It might very well impact one or more of my siblings but at least she's not waiting until the snow flies before coming up with ideas.

I'm still nervous but less so than when I went.

A tale of two Madison Restaurants

A difference in Customer Service

This is a story of two Madison, WI restaurants and how they treat their customers.

Chapter One

I went to Madison yesterday for a gallery event. My friend, Richard Knight, has a wonderful galley exhibit at the Overture Center in the Watrous gallery. Check it out. So my wife, Brooke and I decided to make a night of it. We love Madison and only get there once or twice a year. But it has some fantastic places to dine and Brooke found her choice for that night.

Our friends Josh and Sandy were going to be in Madison for the evening, too! So we booked a party of six at the Harvest Restaurant right on the Captial Square. Big mistake.

We arrived at 8:15 and were seated quickly outside. It was a glorious July evening and we settled in for a wonderful experience. Madison has hundreds of restaurants and the Capital boasts a good number of them all within walking distance from each other. I mention this because we had a choice. We made a reservation beforehand and chose this single place to spend our time and spend our money. Six persons at an somewhat pricey restaurant was going run us a few bucks but that's ok. We don't do it that often and I am a believer in spending hard earned money and getting an experience, not just a dinner.

The waiter was a young man and greeted us in short order. Seemed personable and friendly. Took our drink orders and didn't come back for quite some time. I had a view into the restaurant's bar from my location and it appeared that our waiter was mixing the drinks himself. In any event, in about 25 minutes he returned with our drinks and then took our order.

This is when the real waiting started.

We were in a pretty chipper mood. We hadn't seen Josh and Sandy for a while and were catching up. Kay and Rick were in fine form after Rick's gallery event which went well.

But shortly it became apparent that something was amiss. There seemed to be quite a few waitstaff running around but food was coming out slowly if at all and our visits from our friendly waiter were few and far between. After about 45 minutes of this, we started to get a grumpy. We're closing in on 9:30pm and most places stop serving at 10:00. Some of our party needed to hit the road and get back to Milwaukee, too.

After a while, our friends who needed to get on the road simple couldn't wait any longer and decided to close out their check. He walked inside was confronted by the manager who informed him that our dinners were being set out on the table as they were speaking. Not true, though we did receive our appetizers while he was inside. Unfortunately, he hadn't ordered one.

We were talking amongst ourselves and the manager heard us and came to see what was the matter. We explained the situation and she curtly informed us that a larger party was in the back room and that was probably the issue. This is our problem? She then asked us "what direction we wanted to take our grievances?". We were certainly getting irritated at this point and said that we needed only to get our drinks and our dinners. She told us she'd check with the kitchen staff and left.

We were getting fed up quickly but not with a nice dinner. Josh went after her to see if we could just pay our bill. He caught up with her at the door to the kitchen where she was explaining to the staff that "another 5 minutes and she was going to ask our table to leave". Perhaps we were complaining too much? Josh said we didn't need 5 minutes and could we just have our bill.

We were unhappy and incredulous that such a supposedly nice restaurant would treat us like this. We are not unreasonable. An explanation at the beginning might have made it better, but at least we could have made a decision to go elsewhere. Instead, the manager was rude and unpleasant and unnecessarily brash. We'll certainly never eat there again. (or, perhaps I should say, we'll never be back since we didn't eat there the first time)

Chapter two

Peppinos on Capital Square is a city block away from the Harvest. At 10 after 10:00 we walked in and it was apparent that they were just about settled for the evening but we asked for a table. An older fellow behind the kitchen counter space thought for a second, and said, "sure, no problem".

We proceeded to have a fantastic dining experience. We were still unsettled from the previous experience but drinks were ordered and our lovely waitress presented them with a smile on her face and a bounce in her step. We had a leisurely dinner, never wanting for anything and always delivered cheerfully.

The food was great. The company was great. The restaurant (Peppinos) was great. The experience was great.

Shortly before we called it a night, Peppino himself showed up. He was the fellow that gave us entry before.

He was born in Sicily and came to Wisconsin as a young man. We found out many other interesting fact because he took the time to meet us personally and engage us in some history and drama, all from his life's story. By the time the night was coming to a end, we had received a complementary Citronella (lemon liquor; appropriate since Pepino had grown up on a lemon farm) and a bunch of smiles back on our faces. The waitress received a nice, fat tip, too.

I've been involved in customer service for many years. Some would say that we're all customer service representatives no matter what we do for a living. What I've discovered is that the customer isn't always right, but they're always the customer and there is never a reason to be rude or insulting to somebody who's funding your business. My friends and I were treated poorly and left the first establishment unhappy. We finished the evening quite happy because a second establishment knew what their priorities were.

It's unfortunate that some people need to be reminded but it's not surprising.

Harvest: Consider yourself reminded.

Back in Milwaukee...now for some video!

After spending a couple of months in the Carolinas, we've returned to the great state of Wisconsin and have gotten right to work.

Heretofore, we have focused mainly on the interviews: identifying appropriate candiadates, gathering the necessary equipment, going on location.

We've now performed about 20 interviews and the video is burning a hole in our website. We're anxious to get excerpts and full videos done.

Some of the videos almost edit themselves. Perhaps, they're concise or we just remember them well enough that we can go right to the juicy stuff. In some cases, we bonded to the people to whom we were talking. We may have become friendly with them or we may just have enjoyed the interview ourselves. In any case, editing them can seem almost easy.

Other videos will require some intense study and, in some cases, we may need to watch the entire videos again: reliving our time at the shoot. This is not necessarily a bad thing but it is time consuming and it slows us down.

We're using Final Cut Pro for the editing although we have Sony Vegas as a back up...just in case. We have plenty of hard disk space, but even a Terabyte fills up fast when you're dumping hours and hours of video on it. We're evaluating upgrading our disk drives, but haven't made that decision just yet.

We have two Mac systems on which we can edit. Brooke does the vast majority of the editing; she's a pro! I've been going through some Final Cut tutorials and may take a whack at some of the interviews...it'll be good for me to get this ability so we both can crank out the videos.

The website is being updated daily but we're still searching for a good look and feel. We're using a content management software system called Joomla. It's pretty easy to add pages and change the look and feel of the entire system but this may turn out to be phase one of the site. Phase two may just require a professional designer to be involved.

It's exciting to be home but it was equally sad to leave Asheville. We really fell in love with the city and have already spoken about making a return visit either in the Summer or next Winter (or both!)

Asheville Interviews

Greg, Toni, Brooke and Greg Flys with Eagles, Black Mountain, NC

















Bob White, Lucia Daugherty and kids, Asheville
















RegJamyl, Asheville, NC