Bluetooth enters the speech recognition world

Friday, July 28, 2006

One of the few speech recognition software drawbacks is being eliminated as Nuance announced that the latest version of Dragon Naturally Speaking now supports Bluetooth wireless headsets. In the early versions depending on the microphone wire length you had little freedom of movement but the Bluetooth revolution lets you stay away up to 30 feet from the personal computer.

Unfortunately Nuance has only certified two headsets for the version 9 of its product but in the future the compatibility list will surely expand. For the moment the two headsets are the BlueParrott B1000-GTX (produced by VXI Corp) and the Sony Ericsson Akono Headset HBH-300. They both have good reviews so everything will be just fine with these two products until the list expands.

There are few doubts that this will happen because the further freedom introduced by the wireless headsets combined by the product enhancements are drawing great reviews for Dragon Naturally Speaking 9.0.

In fact this is the first version that does not need to be trained to recognize your voice the first time that you launch the application. Besides it is now capable to better distinguish words in the normal talking flow. Clearly it’s not perfect (some people accents give trouble to humans too :-)) but it’s a huge improvement in this technology.