Thread: PCs that respond to your voice

Does anyone think one day we translators will be able to "dictate" our translations to the PC with no need to type??? It would safe so much time...I think we are not far - technologically speaking - of achieving this...

That surely saves a lot of time... that's not something for the future, there's software, whose name I don't remember now because I don't use it, that has been out in the market software that does it for some time. If anyone knows the name, please post it here so that we all can look it up and maybe buy it.

Dragon Naturally Speaking

http://www.nuance.com/naturallyspeaking/

Hey, that's really good news! Thanks for letting me know there's already this type of software in the market. Have you tried it, Moni?

I used some speech recognition program a few years ago and it was terrible. It was kind of like a machine translation. You spend so much time correcting things that it is more trouble than its worth. I imagine this will change though in a few years.

Personally, I don't think there will ever be a software program powerful enough to accurately interpret and render differences in tone, pronunciation and accentuation proper to spoken language. Not to mention dialect and homonyms, which abound in some languages. A Belgian company once claimed to have achieved just that, but they were later exposed as frauds who used company funds to buy their own stock in order to (artificially) fortify the company's position on Wall Street. (Google "Lernaut & Hauspie" for more info).

Food for thought, this quiz comparing machine translation to the work of Nobel Prize winning author William Faulkner:

http://reverent.org/sounds_like_faulkner.html