[MV] Re: PC Immulators for VV

[T. Patrick Henebry]

>They've been working on
>the PC versions of ViaVoice and NaturallySpeaking much much longer then
>there Mac counterparts.

I am not privy to behind the scenes development Information, but if I 
remember correctly the first continuous speech recognition program 
for the Macintosh was released sometime in 1998--approximately one 
year after Dragon's Systems released the first version of 
NaturallySpeaking for Windows.  NaturallySpeaking was the first 
continuous speech recognition program for personal computers on the 
market.  By late 1999 at the end of some ferocious competition and 
some industry shakeups the speech recognition market on the PC side 
became both mature and stable.  From a development standpoint not 
much more can be done on the PC side until there is a fundamental 
breakthrough in terms of programming the speech recognition engine 
itself. 

The Macintosh side of the market has not had the benefit of having 
cutthroat competition between four companies (there are now only two 
on the PC side).  I am sure this is part of the reason for the 
disparity between platforms in terms of capabilities. 

My main concern when it comes to speech recognition has always been a 
which particular program is the best tool for the job at hand 
regardless of what operating system is being used.  I have never been 
able to understand in all my years of working with computers why 
individuals sometimes feel such passionate hatred for a particular 
platform.
-- 
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T. Patrick Henebry