Just a couple of years ago, the PC speech recognition and dictation market saw four key players jostling for position, but today the contest is just between IBM and one other player, Dragon.

It could be said that this is a good example of survival of the fittest, as the Dragon and IBM products were generally regarded as the stronger offerings. IBMs ViaVoice has successfully combined rich features with good accuracy, something Voice Xpress failed to do. Meanwhile, Dragon NaturallySpeaking may have been lighter on features, but enjoyed the strongest recognition engine in terms of accuracy. But now, Lernout & Hauspie has endowed Dragon NaturallySpeaking 6 (see Reviews, issue 89, p140) with many of the fancy features that once adorned Voice Xpress. The question is: can IBM ViaVoice 9 withstand the heat from that fearsome Dragon?

IBM candidly admits there isnt a huge difference between ViaVoice versions 8 and 9. The main enhancements include USB microphone support, Windows XP compatibility and the inclusion of a large font display during initial enrolment for people with impaired sight. Version 9 is also better equipped for use with Microsoft Office XP. But the underlying basics of ViaVoice 9 its user interface, recognition engine and vocabulary are mostly unchanged from version 8.

Version 8 will on the shelves alongside 9 for the foreseeable future, as it can be used with Windows NT, with which the new version is now incompatible.
Out of the box, its remarkable how similar both Dragons and IBMs products are during installation. Both packages require ten to 15 minutes worth of enrolment dictation to tune the recognition engine to your own voice. ViaVoice can be used on a PC with as little as 300MHz of Pentium-class processing power unless youre running Windows ME, which mysteriously requires a minimum of a 600MHz chip. ViaVoice 9 really needs all the processing power it can lay its hands on: when using a 1.4GHz Athlon system ViaVoice 9 runs smoothly, but its not quite as razor-sharp in its responses as Dragon NaturallySpeaking 6.

A familiar-looking Andrea NC-61 analog microphone headset is supplied with ViaVoice 9. For USB compatibility, theres a separate Andrea USB adaptor. This is a bit of a halfway-house solution, as only the microphone uses the USB port. The NC-61 headset incorporates a single headphone speaker, but has to be connected to the host PCs conventional analog speaker-out connection. If you use a USB hub, the supplied extra speaker lead may be too short to reach your PC. My own DSP USB headset, which uses USB for both the microphone and playback channels, worked fine, however.

ViaVoice 9 is good at ignoring the inevitable extraneous sounds. Good dictation accuracy was achieved, even when used in a room with a fairly noisy PC just a few feet away.

Comparison with Dragon 6 sees the breadth of ViaVoice 9s vocabulary fare poorly. The laurels for out-of-the-box accuracy go to Dragon, though ViaVoice absorbs new words effectively through its training procedure. Still, its easier to correct mistakes with Dragon.

No voice dictation package is currently immune from getting muddled between spoken commands and dictated words. But once again, Dragon NaturallySpeaking 6 makes a better job of this than ViaVoice 9, although when it gets it right ViaVoice 9 demonstrates some strong facilities.

There are no fundamental flaws in ViaVoice 9. It offers dictation plus Windows and Web browser navigation using voice commands. It has a good vocabulary expansion system, including analysis of existing documents for unknown words. Its vocabulary starts with 150,000 words, and there are 260,000 additional words in its backup dictionary. More importantly, when correcting mistakes you can hear a recording of your own utterances, something Voice Xpress never offered.
ViaVoice is a good speech dictation package, but if you can stretch to the substantial extra cost of Dragon 6, you wont regret it.

Ian Burley