Have a word with your Mac

A high-quality yet budget-priced speech recognition package takes advantage of the digitizer chip now built into the new Macs.

Articulate Systems, the Massachusetts supplier of speech recognition systems for the Macintosh, has announced a software-only package, called Voice Navigator sw. Although the company correctly heralds it as a milestone product speech recognition packages have hitherto required an add-on card or an external device to handle analog-digital conversion it should not be construed that Voice Navigator sw now achieves everything in software. Rather, it takes advantage of a sound digitizer now built into the motherboards of the more recent Macs models, including the Classic II, the Quadras, and two of the Powerbooks. The package also includes a unidirectional desktop micro phone or a headset microphone (your choice) as the microphones built into these new Macs are not suited for voice recognition. For Macs without a built-in digitizer, Articulate Systems will continue to offer Voice Navigator II. It includes both a microphone and an external digitizer which connects to the Mac’s SCSI port.
    Rather than suggesting that people can now dispose of keyboards as arcane input paraphernalia, Articulate Systems positions the Voice Navigator as the ideal way to control a Mac. By means of the Language Maker Desk Accessory, a user can create files containing the commands associated with a given program. These commands each have corresponding voice files, the actual digitized sound maps of your voice. In this way, Articulate Systems has prepared a Voice User Interface for PageMaker, which the company says enables PageMaker users to “seamlessly control all aspects of the application using spoken commands.” Voice Navigator, which is based on Dragon Systems’ speech recognition technology, is speaker-dependent and requires a short training session. Voice Navigator II and II sw cost us$795 and us$395 respectively.

Articulate Systems 600 West Cummings Park, Suite 4500, Woburn, MA 01801, usa Tel +1 617 935 5656, Fax +1 617 935 0490 >