About This Particular Macintosh 6.04 - eDisk

And in this hour, I’ve seen enough to believe this is more than a technical oddity, more thana gee-whiz-what’ll-they-think-of-next. My first impression is that this is going to be a workablesystem once I get up to speed with it.So I’m going to do some Reviewing Beyond the Call of Duty. I’m going to spend a monthwith ViaVoice. As a novice touch-typist, it took me a month before I could find the ‘B’ keywith any consistency, but I eventually got with the program, and I’m going to give ViaVoicean equally fair trial.Voice recognition is an interesting challenge. Voices are different, accents are different, andit’s not likely that a system customised for me will work for you. ViaVoice has a clever initialtraining routine, where you read a story to your Mac. ViaVoice knows the text, and itmatches your voice with the words it expects to hear. After I read it a short story, I openedIBM SpeakPad (the text-recognizing mode of this program) and said, “I’ll be darned, itworks,” and the rest is history.The voice recognizer will mis-recognize a word or two at first, and it’s worth the trouble tocorrect it so it can get it right next time. If you correct by selecting wrong words and spellingthem right, ViaVoice will add them to its vocabulary (for example, earlier this evening itdidn’t know “poof ” was a word, but it does now). Still—utter non sorghum stenches—neversend out a ViaVoice document without looking it over closely for words that sound prettyclose but aren’t quite right.Even more important than training ViaVoice is letting ViaVoice train you. It has some specialcommands for punctuation, cursor movement, and the like; and you have to memorizethese commands or you’re wasting your time. I can press the return key much faster than Ican look up the New Paragraph command, but now that I have it memorized, it takes notime at all.How do I rate ViaVoice? To quote the 8-balls of my youth, “Reply hazy, ask again later.” Itlooks promising, but let’s find out if it can keep its promise. I’ll see you back here in May.Copyright ©2000 Jamie McCornack, jmccornack@atpm.com. Reviewing in ATPM is open to anyone. If you’reinterested, write to us at reviews@atpm.com.ATPM 6.04 ← 121 → Stuff: ViaVoice Millennium Edition