CPA Practice Advisor

FEB 2012

Today's Technology for Tomorrow's Firm.

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THE BLEEDING EDGE W Dave McClure Talking To Your Computer When Armageddon comes, I am convinced that it will not be the result of an epic bat le between good and evil, or even between the haves and the have-nots. T e bat le that destroys the known uni- verse will be, as it has been for several decades now, between Microsoſt , Apple and Google. Everywhere you turn, you are confronted by the armies of these three giants, scrambling for another point of market share and crushing or buying any third parties that get in their way. And now these three forces have found a new battleground in soſt ware that enables voice recognition and com- mands. You know, the soſt ware that lets the crew of Star Trek simply speak in English to search databases and execute commands. T ere are essentially four players in this tech area: • Microsoſt , which is scrambling to improve on their lead in this market. Microsoſt has bundled free speech recognition soſt ware with its operating systems since Windows XP, improving the system year aſt er year (hint: you'll fi nd it in the "Acces- sories" folder). For the record, the Windows 7 iteration works amazingly well. In fact I'm dic- tating this paragraph via the Speech recognition program. If there's a weakness to Microsoft's implementation, it is that editing capabilities are very limited. Mr. McClure is a consultant and widely published writer on technology issues. He can be contacted at dave.mcclure@ cpapracticeadvisor.com 26 26 February 2012 • Apple has built some limited speech recognition capabilities into its OS X operating system to assist in navigation. For dictation and editing, you will need third party "Dictate" soſt ware from Nuance. But this is just the tip of the iceberg for Apple, which has built some fairly strong voice command capabili- ties into the iPhone 4S, and has pushed a new, voice-driven application in its "Siri" personal assistant applica- tion. • Google has no intention of being leſt behind in this new technology. The company has bundled voice capabilities for February 2012 • www.C www.CPAPracticeAdvisor.com search into its Chrome browser, and offers robust voice command and search capabilities into the Android operating systems for cell phones. • And then there is Nuance. T is company is best known for its Dragon Naturally Speaking soſt ware, which cropped up in ads during the last holiday season. It is a sharp, professional-level program whose only limitation is its learning curve, which is somewhat higher than that of the other prod- ucts. In addition, just before last Christmas the company purchased a cell phone app maker called Vlingo, an up-and-coming player in the cell phone voice command arena with a decent app that works on Apple, Google and Blackberry devices. Whether Nuance becomes the fourth major player in this cat fi ght, or is simply absorbed by one of the other three, the bat le is shaping quickly. It would be nice to point clearly to a winner among these contestants, but that isn't going to happen this year. In the cell phone arena, Vlingo and Siri are competing with in-built voice command systems, and none of them do it well. Siri is at the moment just the personal assistant app it claims to be, with virtually no editing or message handling capabilities. Vlingo has excellent features to read and write messages, but does a horrible job with simple phone calls. On the desktop, Dragon Speaking Naturally takes top honors as a general speech recognition and command system, but comes with the highest price tag. Microsoft Speech Recognition is free, but stumbles in a number of areas. It correctly recognizes the word "col- loquialism," but doesn't handle "ain't" and "y'all." Google's system requires the user to use the company's Chrome browser, a program whose main function is to track every- thing you do online and sell that information to advertisers. But look for things to change rapidly in 2012. With this many major players in the game and big money being thrown at the program, we can expect to see new products to shove their way into the fray, and new versions of existing products to debut regularly. For these new products and versions to gain any traction, however, they will need to do three things that none of the products do today. First, they will have to perform easily what we do every day on our devices. An application that takes six steps to do what you can do with a single mouse-click today is not useful. Second, they need to bet er accommodate diff er- ences in speaking styles, particularly the regional dialects of English. If I must learn to speak like a Maine Yankee to use the soſt ware, I won't bother. And finally, they must be able to work with additional hardware. If they cannot work off of the microphone and speakers built into my device, they are too much trouble to work with. Otherwise, we have four armies in contention. Let the bat les begin.

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