Last night was our monthly Macintosh enthusiast meeting and I provided part of the program. What I demonstrated was a voice recognition system called ViaVoice by IBM. The idea is that you speak into it and it types the text as you say it. The program is a specialist, rather than a generalist and it creates a large file of your voice and how you say words. The more you use it and train it, the better it works. I am just at the beginning of the process, but went ahead to demonstrate the potential of what it can do.

Well, because of the ambiguities in the English language, it makes lots of mistakes at my stage of the game. One of the things one has to do is enunciate the punctuation as one goes along. For example, at the end of each sentence one says, “period” and ViaVoice closes he sentence and moves along to the next one. It is possible to use the commands within the sentence by using hesitations. Someone from the audience asked my to say, “She missed her period.”.

So, I said, “She missed her period period.”

Without any hesitation, ViaVoice came back, “She Mr..”