SR comparisons, was:Re: [MV] IBM ViaVoice 3 and 10.4.7

[Chuck Rogers]

All:

iListen has had the ability to create custom vocabularies for many,  
many years. We have a doctor who states that he was getting about 95  
accuracy - with his medical terms - within a week or two of  
purchasing iListen. That was almost a year ago. I heard from him  
recently, and he is now consistently getting 98-99 percent accuracy  
on a regular basis.

There is always a down side to a pre-built vocabulary, which is why  
we resist it so strongly: in speaking with medical professionals,  
they have told us 99% of the time they use a word from a group of 500  
to 1000 specialized words. This is because, while there are a  
percentage of medical terms that everyone uses, the rest of the words  
a particular individual uses are unique to their discipline.

The average pre-built vocabulary adds 10,000 to 15,000 new words that  
the speech engine can recognize. In iListen's case, it can already  
recognize about 300,000 words. But adding another 9,000 to 14,000  
words to the vocabulary you will never use is going to decrease  
accuracy a bit since you are increasing your word choices. In our  
tests, we have found this to be the case.

BUT, adding only the words you use has a couple of advantages. The  
first is obvious: adding only the words you use not only increases  
the odds those words will be recognized accurately, but also  
decreases the odds other words will be introduced into the vocabulary  
that could be mis-recognized instead of what you actually said. A  
second benefit it more subtle. Because the way we add the words en  
masse is through the "Learn My Writing Style" feature, iListen  
actually learns them in context - meaning it improves by a  
considerable amount the odds of those words being recognized right  
off the bat.

Our doctor friend - who, by the way, is one of the people who insists  
that he is getting better results from iListen than he did from  
Dragon after FIVE YEARS!!! - goes one step further with a process we  
now recommend to our medical professionals: when, in the course of  
normal dictation, he says a word that has not been added yet, he (of  
course) adds it at that point. But AFTER he is finished with the  
document he then has iListen analyze it immediately using "Learn My  
Writing Style." He says he has found the odds that iListen gets the  
new word right the first time improve dramatically when he does this.

We would not have thought of doing that, but it does make sense.

I hope this information is helpful.


Best Regards,

Chuck Rogers, Chief Evangelist
MacSpeech, Inc.




On Sep 2, 2006, at 9:18 AM, Jonathan Levi, M.D. wrote:

> At 7:08 AM -0500 9/2/06, Paul Spilseth wrote:
>> Chuck,
>> I would like to use iListen, but ViaVoice has a medical dictionary  
>> that I need.
>> Paul Spilseth, MD
>
> Ditto, except that my medical dictionary (about 1,000 words and  
> macros) has been created by me, and is still a work in progress.  
> Presumably iListen allows the creation of a custom vocabulary (if  
> not, that's a capacity you must run, not walk, to add) but I'm  
> apprehensive, I think for obvious reasons, about recreating that  
> vocabulary. --Jonathan
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