THE WEIRS TIMES, Thursday, April 8, 2010
13
by Mal Fuller
Contributing Writer
Well, things may be looking up. That’s be- cause I “did my duty” and disclosed to my Weirs Times readers the fact that Malzy, Diablo and I are on UStream Friday nights and not one reader gave me any feedback in return. UStream does provide us with the num- ber of viewers we have each week. Last Friday’s antique radio presenta- tion attracted a respect- able number of viewers, but no new records were set. Hopefully, this is an indicator that not too much damage was done to my credibility! I haven’t complained about MacSpeech Dictate in my column for quite a while. That fact should not be taken as an indica- tor that MacSpeech has addressed the issues that I have with their product. Months ago, I took consid- erable time and effort to illustrate to the technical support folks at the com- pany the problems that their speech recognition program has. By way of illustration, I sent them a copy of one of my Weirs Times articles and then also dictated that article using MacSpeech Dictate and emailed to them the convoluted text that their deeply flawed program had produced. Previous to doing that
they told me that I wasn’t verbalizing things with sufficient expression to al- low their program to make proper use of apostrophes. In my email I invited the member of the technical support team who told me that to try dictating my article and see for himself what incoherent results he got. Much to my amaze- ment, especially in view of the fact that honesty is
tinuity and expression one would expect from Mr. Rogers. Almost always, if it has left the apostrophe out the first time, it will continue to do so. Trust me and take my complaint seriously.
Malcolm Fuller On Oct 21, 2009, at
This is the proposed sign to be erected in Center Harbor by the Belknap College Alumni. I hope when they have the sign made the first sentence is re-written to end with the words, “who welcomed them.”
a scarce commodity these days, my MacSpeech cor- respondent tried dictating my article and when he did he reported unsatis- factory results just like I had gotten. He would turn my case over to engi- neering for them to fix, he reported. In view of the time that
has passed, it would seem that engineering is stumped. But instead of making me whole for my purchase and troubles, they’ve steadfastly avoid-
This granite bench is representative of the one the Belknap College Alumni plan to give to the Town of Center Harbor in appreciation of that Town’s having been a cordial host to the College and its students. It will be appropriately inscribed.
ed further correspondence about the problem with me in spite of my efforts to get them to produce an answer. While I’ve been twisting in the wind, the two companies that were selling speech recogni- tion software, MacSpeech Dictate and Dragon Natu- rally Speaking have be- come united as one. For a month or more I’ve been deluged with email adver- tising that fact. Were the new company to figure that I was a real think-
New Arrival...
at Kindred Spirit Farm
Registered Shetland Sheep
NASSA Flock #1755
ing entity instead of an email address they’d stop wasting their time! My problems began with this email exchange:
“Re: case #400724393 When the apostro-
phe’s been left out, I’ve “scratched that” and re- dictated the sentence speaking with all the con-
port@macspeech.com> <dictate-support@mac- speech.com> wrote:
Hello, Malcolm, I tested Dictate
and as long as you are us- ing the word in a complete phrase (to show Dictate the context that you are using the word in), it will put an apostrophe. For example, if you have a choppy sentence “Mikes” <pause>lemonade is tart”, it is not going to know you meant that the lemonade belongs to Mike to provide the apostrophe “s”. But
See RAMBLING on 14
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