RE: The Perpetual Myth of iSeries Obsolescence -- MIDRANGE-L

Like everything else, there are places where it works exceptionally well,and places with some of the problems you cite. It is used in the medicalprofession similar to heads down keying. A doctor or othermedical professional has hands totally free while speaking into amike. Later that recording is fed to voice to text and reviewed by a humanto make any corrections.

I gave this as an example of technology marches onwards. It is not justthe mouse vs. keyboard anymore. There have been great advances inalternatives for the disabled, and eventually some of those may spin off toconventional applications.

The problem with voice recognition in the office is that people will
talk louder like they do with cel phones & speaker phones.  Over time
your average office will sound like a huge n-way shouting match. :) All
of this background noise might overcome the noise cancellation
capabilities of the speech recognition app.

I usually do heavy editing while I'm typing.  Things like
up-up-overbyword a few times-select-type replacement word(s)-go back to
where I was etc.  Those things aren't efficient with voice systems.
Maybe a hybrid where the mouse & keyboard are used for editing and
managing the UI while the voice is used for pure dictation would work.
Also, we will frequently still need to type as many of us will be doing
text entry or taking notes during conference calls & meetings.
Multitasking.  And there's the issue of handling conversations while
working.

I haven't run voice recognition for years.  I think I was running OS/2
Warp the last time I tried it at home.  I've been considering giving it
another go at home, but I don't see it as feasible in the office.

John A. Jones, CISSP
Americas Information Security Officer
Jones Lang LaSalle, Inc.
V: +1-630-455-2787 F: +1-312-601-1782
john.jones@xxxxxxxxxx

-----Original Message-----
Al Mac

In my opinion the best tool for text input is the human voice.  IBM and
the competition have developed solutions that can compensate for human
pronounciation variations, such as regional dialect, using a second
language, and context for words that sound the same like "too" "two"
"to"
but seems to me this technology has been slow to be deployed, perhaps
because it needs more hardware gas than many other ingredients,
resulting in the users having to speak artificially slow.

Do we talk faster, or type faster, accurately?

Actually the human brain goes faster than either talking or typing, but
I not want to suggest research into figuring out how to do direct input,
since the privacy and security abuses could be astronomical.

> > A mouse was designed to be productive, and it can be.
>
>For certain tasks, yes.  Text entry does not happen to be one of them.
>It's the classic "use the right tool for the right job".