Re: Bit of a sinking feeling about boot camp (rant - ish)

Mark:

You do not know what you are talking about. We have literally hundreds
of users who have verified, through their own experience, that
microphones we have not certified to work well with Mac OS X will
result in poorer accuracy.

Your "strawman" argument has no merit against the empirical evidence
we have collected from our end users, and the established facts
presented to us by Apple.

When you decide to cooperate with us instead of argue, you will find
iListen a much more useful tool.

Best Regrads,

Chuck Rogers, Chief Evangelist
MacSpeech, Inc.



Mark Conrad wrote:
In article <1150514265.390624.206130@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
<chuck.rogers@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Mac hardware and OS X want a more robust audio signal.

You never give up throwing out strawmen, do you?

Not even Apple engineers would be stupid enough to tie themselves down
to one type of cheapy microphone, given all the audio jobs that a Mac
can do.

Let's now tear down your latest strawman.

Nothing mysterious about a microphone, no special voodoo, as you
maintain. A mic' is simply a device to change speech sound to an
electrical signal which can be handled by Apple's own AIFF system,
which you already agreed is essentially similar to the WAV system for
PCs.

Commonly, both iListen and Dragon include a cheapy mic' headset with
their software, which if you bought seperately would cost about $20.

Dragon's cheapy mic' is an Aandrea NC-91 presently.

I believe that iListen's cheap version is a Parrott VXI.

Both use an external soundcard to allow them to use the USB port, the
soundcard comes included with their microphone.

The soundcard determines the "level" of strength of the signal going to
the computer. Soundcards have internal noise which often affects
accuracy of dictation, especially when dealing with mic's that have
very weak output signals.

An effort should be made to use low-noise soundcards when using mic's
that have weak output signals. There are utility programs that can
display the internal noise of any given soundcard.

These 3rd-party utilities can also determine if the strength of the
soundcard is adequate to drive whatever speech software you are using,
whether it is Dragon or iListen, on a PC or a Mac.

Overall, the Dragon cheapy mic' is physically better constructed than
the iListen cheapy mic', but they are both cheap mic's for crying out
loud.

Six of one, half a dozen of the other. Both are cheap mic's, I use
them interchangably.

But the cheap mic's get the job done. Neither iListen nor Dragon is
about to include a "more robust", e.g. "better", microphone with their
software.

BTW, the "robustness" of a USB mic' is heavily influenced by whatever
included soundcard you are using with the mic'.

An excellent soundcard can not turn a crappy mic' into a good mic'.

Conversely, a low quality USB soundcard can drag down a good mic',
making it appear to be a rotten mic'.




Not that I _have_ to use cheap mic's, mind you.

I own a Sennheiser microphone, model MD 431-II that commonly is
advertised at a cost of $460. Shopping yields a street price of $374
or less. I have a mic' "boom" for it which costs another $600, or a
street price of $500 or less.

The Sennheiser has an essentially flat frequency response of 40 to
16,000Hz., which is much better than the cheap mic's furnished with
either Dragon or iListen. In theory, the extended freq' response
should make for more accurate speech recognition, however...

The effective improvement in speech dictation accuracy is minimal with
this excellent mic', so save your money.

The speech software is what effectively limits accuracy, unless you
really go out of your way to find a really rotten microphone.



FWIW, iListen's own "quality" analysis of the Dragon cheapy mic'
determined that it was acceptable.

In the past, in a desperate effort to milk more accuracy out of
iListen, I used their supplied mic', however the accuracy of the
MacSpeech product named iListen remained as dismal as usual.



Now if you want to persist in raising these strawmen, we can discuss
microphone characteristics, next time we dance.

Mark-


Chuck Roger's entire post follows -
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Mark:

Only time will tell if you are more satisfied with the upcoming
version, but the one thing I can tell you is that you are flat out
wrong regarding microphones. Yes, an AIFF file and WAV file are the
same, but that has nothing to do with what I said.

Mac hardware and OS X want a more robust audio signal. This is not
speculation. This is what Apple's engineers that work on the hardware
have told us. I used to work at Apple. I know who they are. I spoke
with them. So you can "fiddle dee-dee" all you want, but if you would
stop shrugging things like this off and just TRY what we suggest, you
may be extraordinarily impressed with the results. That headset that
gives you 100% accuracy on your PC will not do the same for iListen or
ViaVoice on the Mac. It won't because it can't.

This is, in fact, the reason ViaVoice stopped working on the Mac. They
wrote their own sound driver to boost the gain so they could ship the
same mics with the Mac version that they were shipping with the PC
version. Over time, this sound driver became less and less compatible
with newer Macs until now it won't work at all. How do I know this? The
lead engineer for ViaVoice used to work at Apple and we kept in touch
when we left Apple.

Best Regards,

Chuck Rogers, Chief Evangelist
MacSpeech, Inc.


Mark Conrad wrote:
In article <1150393049.954102.305100@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
<chuck.rogers@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Mark - the microphone you are using can make a tremendous difference.

- - - and - - -

...<clipped>...you will get poorer accuracy - so it is
like comparing Apple's and Oranges.

Oh fiddle dee dee, please don't bring up that straw man.

That exact USB microphone was used also on my Intel-based Mac Mini Duo
when it was running BootCamp and Dragon, with 100% accuracy on our test
example.


...<clippity clip clip>...not take into account Mac OS X's more
robust audio in requirements...<clippity clip clop>...

Horsepucky, the AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format) format that Macs
use and the WAV format that PCs use are equivilent in quality.

Sound utilities commonly convert between the two with _no_ loss in
the quality of the audio - - - another strawman of yours.


BTW - we will have an update coming out soon that is blowing away our
beta testers and certain press people to whom we have granted early
access in terms of training time and accuracy. I will be very
interested in seeing what you have to say once you try it.

Gadd, I hope so. I am tired of fiddling with Windows just to get
decent dictation accuracy.

I also hope MacSpeech creates a more expensive Pro version, one that
has a lot of the good added features of Dragon Pro.

Those added features do not improve accuracy enough to really matter,
however they really speed up the correction process, and the "feature"
learning curve, and many other perks that serious users look for in a
speech recognition application.

Generally, any features which speed up the overall process of
converting speech to text, are features that are important to the Pro
users.

It does little good to speak at 160wpm if the correction process slows
the overall speed down to 40wpm or less.

Also, I myself would pay big bucks for a Super Pro version which could
accept raw audio input, either AIFF or WAV or even a proprietory format
optimized for human speech - - - and route the raw audio to a
sophisticated Artificial Intelligence module that could handle homonyms
and other in-context stuff that present speech app's stumble over.

So much for my wish list.

Anyhow, I am looking forward to the new version of iListen.

One added thing. There is a NG named comp.speech.users that is
useful, many newbies to speech recognition use it.

It is heavily biased in favor of Dragon, but enough Mac guys like me
hang out there to make it a useful place to get the straight poop.

Mark-


.

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