This has been brought up before is some threads, but has come up again recently. I promised that I would make a post about this so, here it goes...
There have been some posts where people have asked to be able to use Dragon Naturally Speaking (DNS) with ARC. To do this, there would have to be a separate application installed which would handle this unless there is a change to ARC itself to allow this to happen. To build an application outside of ARC to allow this would require some programming and a $2000.00 investment in the DNS developer software. To use this new tool, you would have to launch a separate application on your computer to handle speech recognition, which would pass the spoken text back to a variable in ARC. You would have to develop scripts in ARC to handle what to do with this spoken text. Another application would also need to be written that would allow the user to train DNS.
The idea of crowd funding has been brought up a few times in the past, but always in other threads that not everyone might have seen. I would like to suggest crowd funding of this idea again. It would be great if we could crowd fund the purchase of DNS Developer for EZ-Robot to add the ability to choose either DNS or Windows Speech Recognition engine directly within ARC. If that is not possible and there were enough people willing to crowd fund the purchase of DNS Developer, I would be willing to develop the 3rd party apps that could be used to handle what was described above.
This is to see how much interest there is in doing this. Please post if you would be interested in donating to this project or to donating to see if we can get this feature added directly into ARC.
One important thing to remember here. This path would only enable DNS for the applications above. It would not enable it on every application outside of these. In other words, you wouldn't have all of DNS on your machine, but only for use with ARC.
As others have said, DNS is far superior to MS, David C said about 2 times, I would say it's much higher than that.
Accuracy in dictation out of the box is insanely high, MS on the other hand is ridiculously low.
Grammar mode, MS works OK. I use MS and Grammar mode with "payload" files which hold the relevant words or phrases for the command I am speaking, for instance if I ask it to "Play music by <artist>" it will recognise the Play music by part then check the <artist> as a separate payload. The payload files do dynamically update (however accuracy is still low on this, even after 5 years of training).
5 years ago I would have jumped on this knowing what I know now. Now, after 5 years of development and training it's not really worth my while but anyone who hasn't spent 5 years of constantly training MS voice recognition (or just wants a very accurate dictation mode) it's a no brainer to use DNS over MS.
deleted post
If I wasn't financially tapped out due to two back to back plumbing disasters in my home, I would donate to this.
What i can do is talk to my Nuance sales rep and see if I can get us a discount on the SDK (no guarantees). I work with Nuance extensively with their enterprise VRU product. My employer spends millions of dollars with them every year, but it is a different division of the company, so I don't know how much my rep could help.
Alan
I would be interested in donating too but that would depend on the amount. Retired here so you can understand that.
I'm in too, only if the final product can support french language.
Hey Aerius,
This is from their document on the developer kit.
DSC supports English (including variants for US, UK, Australian, Southeast Asian and Indian), German, French, Italian, Spanish and Dutch. Other vocabularies provided in DSC are General Vocabulary, Empty Dictation (except in Australian, Southeast Asian and Indian), and Commands Only (available in US and UK English only).
David S,
I think that there is sufficient interest in going forward. Lets setup a go fund me account and have it run for a couple of months. If the money is available early, we can start early. During that time, we can see which way we need to go as far as if DJ would be able to add this into ARC, or if a 3rd party app needs to be developed.
I think all are in agreement that having EZ-Robot do this would be the best option. The 3rd party app will be the fallback incase this isn't doable now by the EZ-Robot team.
Thanks David
@TheTechGuru,
If you could see if it is possible to get a discount, that would be awesome. Please let us know what you find out.
Thanks man. We all appreciate it.