Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!yale!eagle.wesleyan.edu!rcook
From: rcook@eagle.wesleyan.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: Re: Voice Activated Computer (Articulate Systems)
Message-ID: <1991Mar30.132344.41036@eagle.wesleyan.edu>
Date: 30 Mar 91 18:23:44 GMT
References: <3151@beguine.UUCP>
Followup-To: comp.sys.mac.hardware
Organization: Wesleyan University
Lines: 53

In article <3151@beguine.UUCP>, danielg@med.unc.edu (Daniel Gene Sinclair) writes:
> 
> . . . It's called the Voice Navigator II
> 

About two weeks ago I visited a dealer and made a few calls to Articulate
Systems (the company that makes the VNII) and got a few brochures in the mail. 
First of all, it costs about $600.  It is an SCSI device with an 8-bit A-D
converter and a DSP chip (I forget the kind of DSP) running at 16 MHz or so.  I
think it requires 2 megs of RAM, but I'm not sure.  The brochures are
elsewhere.  Since the DSP does all the work, very little load (if any) is put
on the Mac processor, and also because of this, it makes no use of the built in
microphones on the IIsi and LC while providing all their functionality.

You train it to recognize your certain sounds, not necessarily words.  In other
words, you can teach it to recognize when you say 'cut' but it won't recognize
when your mother says 'cut' unless she has exactly the same voice as you or you
teach it to recognize your mother's 'cut'.  There didn't seem to be any limit
on how many sounds it could recognize, so you could conceivably have it
recognize the 200 or so words you use most often and then spell out the less
common words.

Apparently it is connected to the system the same way MacroMaker is.  Instead
of being activated by certain keystrokes or menu clicks it is activated by the
sounds you make.  It seems to be essentially a front-end for MacroMaker, if you
will.  Of course, it doesn't require MacroMaker, but it works the same way,
using sound to generate fake keystrokes or mouse action.  In addition, like
MacroMaker, you can have certain sounds associated with only certain programs.

What would make the product even more attractive would be if it had some sort
of command language, whereby you could dictate actions not expressible as
simple macros.  Imagine it being able to interpret this:  "go to the finder. 
copy the correspondence folder to the internal drive and eject the disk. go to
Word 4. replace attractive with amazing. change font to palatino. change font
to times. save. print on laserwriter. quit. shut down."  This might be a little
complicated, and would probably require recognition of text on the screen, but
would be excruciatingly cool.  Perhaps a first step should be vocal operation
of controls like buttons, scroll bars, check boxes, and menus.

So, from what I have gathered, the Voice Navigator II is not a SpeakWrite, nor
is it a general speech recognizer like the one Kurzweil makes, but it does
appear to be a solid product.  And considering the technology required to
recognize even simple sounds, $600 does not seem unreasonable--it is much more
than a MacRecorder.

By the way, my only connection to Articulate Systems is that I know their phone
number and they know my address, though they have probably forgotten that by
now...

------------------------
Randall Cook
rcook@eagle.wesleyan.edu
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