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Comment by tweetle_beetle | Hacker News Reader

From memory, there was a time (end of millenium?) when using voice recognition to write documents was the next big thing. There was a pricey bit of software for Windows that was popular with power users and they would spend hours training it to their voice.

Then it seemed to just die off. I don't think it was bad technology, because I don't think novelty value was enough to account for its popularity - you had to put hours in to get it to work well, it wasn't a casual toy.

What's changed since then in terms of technology? Unless it's very significant, I suspect it will go the same way. Apart from an assistive technology viewpoint, my gut instinct is that it's not that satisfying or rewarding talking to a computer all day.

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Ah yes, Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Training for hours and hours and getting incredibly subpar results. It was a fun toy but there's a reason it didn't really take off in corporate settings.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking is still alive at least in medical practice. Its Nuance Dragon Medical One product is fairly popular in some regions for medical report dictation as radiologists don't like to write them down (sorry ;) ). I've seen a Philips product in that field too. Seems like LG's TVs used their recognition engine for a while (don't know if that's still valid)

The story for the most mainstream-popular dictation softwares is kind of funny. Back in the late 90's there was Dragon NaturallySpeaking and IBM's ViaVoice. In early 00s, after a financial fraud and bankruptcy involving both the then current Dragon owners and Goldman Sachs, they got bought by Scansoft. Scansoft bought Nuance, began to use its name, and then got exclusive rights for ViaVoice (!) from IBM.

Now, in March this year, Nuance has been acquire by Microsoft.

Interesting, I didn't know the history there! Just remember playing with it as a kid :)

The best recognition rates on the words ‘scratch that’, which you used every other sentence.

> What's changed since then in terms of technology? Unless it's very significant, I suspect it will go the same way. Apart from an assistive technology viewpoint, my gut instinct is that it's not that satisfying or rewarding talking to a computer all day.

Training data is now abundant compared to twenty years ago, and so is computation power. That means training can be much more complex now.

The underlying technology is now typically neural networks (broadly speaking), whereas twenty years ago it might have been Hidden Markov Models.

Overall, recognition quality, even without speaker-specific training, is now on a very different level than back then. Whether it’s considered good is a matter of opinion. But it’s significantly better than twenty years ago.

WFH become more common. You cant program with voice in office full of people who also program with voice. At home you can multytask work with voice while doing home stuff with hands. You just need projector do display on wall while you cook or assemble IKEA table.

I cannot even concentrate on reading a text while the radio is playing; let alone programming while assembling furniture.

It's hugely significant - look at this graph of Google's speech model accuracy across 2013 to 2017:

https://sonix.ai/packs/media/images/corp/articles/history-of...

Or this that shows a similar pattern:

https://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/externa...

Unfortunately 95% isn’t a lot of nines

Human transcription accuracy is just two nines :)

one thing that changed that you can see in a demo, that it's speech recognition paired with a neural network. He doesn't have to say "write titanic = titanic.dropDuplicated()" he just says, "drop duplicates from titanic" so you "in theory" have to write less. It probably falls apart when you have more complex things to write and then you have to fallback to speaking it out word for word, but it is an interesting development

There is a reason we don't have many programming languages where you can say “drop duplicates from titanic”.

what's the reason?

Natural language is ambiguous and doesn't represent nested structures well.

Programming languages need to be unambiguous, but voice interfaces to them don't have to be. With a voice interface, you can say something vague, see what it gets translated into, and either click Run or edit it.

Main things that have changed are:

1) Improvements in speech to text, as others have mentioned

2) Improvements in language models (and model size) allowing for more flexible interpretation of speech. This isn't dictation anymore. It's more like instruction. You don't have to tell the computer exactly what to write, you tell it in much more broader terms. Eg "pull this out into a function". Or "delete the cookie before creating the transaction". Or "lint the file".

That's my guess anyways! This mostly feels like a voice interface to Copilot in a lot of ways. Can't say whether it'll be effective, but I'd love to be able to program while I'm e.g. on a stationary bike!

Isn't that a very niche application simply because it's voice-based? I.e. it can only be used if you are alone in an office, otherwise you would be annoying your coworkers and the voices would get mixed up.

The only time I’ve ever successfully used voice recognition was teaching skyrim to recognize my words of power. Shouting fus-roh-dah ! was incredibly satisfying.

It might have been Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I remember toying around with it 20 years ago or so. Apparently it has just been bought by Microsoft.

I have good memories spending 4+ hours training Dragon to end up with what seemed like 30% accuracy.

I sometimes use voice recognition in Notes on my Mac to write up my meeting notes, but I find that my waffly speech results in very verbose notes. Also still quite a few mis-hears where I read my notes back later and have to work out what I was actually saying.

Can I have transcription that can then turn my rambling into neat and concise prose?

Many people dictate messages on their phones. Doctors use it extensively.

Not a doctor, but I also started to using the dictation feature on my iPhone more and more recently. It's often more convenient than typing when I'm walking (which I do a lot) and the pickup of voice messaging, talking to your phone like it's a mic, made me more comfortable doing it in public.

Dragon speech? I used it quite a bit 10 years ago!

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