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Re: Google Docs Voice Type

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From: deborah.kaplan
Date: Mar 3, 2016 8:46AM

Lisa Snider asked:

> Just curious what y'all think about Google's new Voice Type feature in Google Docs?

I just did a quick comparison between reading the same couple of paragraphs with Dragon NaturallySpeaking and with the Google voice type feature. Obviously they aren't competitive products -- if you are a person who needs Dragon NaturallySpeaking, you're not going to use Google voice type. But it was there to give me a good sense of just comparative dictation, recognition, error rate, etc.

1. The recognition rate was only slightly worse than NaturallySpeaking's. That's not surprising, given that Google has been doing a lot of work and voice recognition, but is very good. Especially when you think that my NaturallySpeaking version is trained, and also I've optimize my voice to its patterns over the years.

2. One thing I found is that it doesn't have any voice correction yet. You dictate, and then you go back with the keyboard in order to correct recognition errors and dictation errors.

3. Another positive feature -- it simply stopped listening to Dragon while I was dictating into Google voice, so even if I hadn't turned off the microphone for Dragon it still would have done the right thing.

4. However, unfortunate corollary: it also stopped listening to keyboard shortcuts, and between no longer listening to Dragon and no longer listening to keyboard shortcuts, there was no hands-free or mouse-free method to disable Google voice type.

5. I would have to play around with it more to see why it was being weird about punctuation. For example, when I tried to put quotation marks around things, it heard the words "open quote" (it might use different syntax).

For people who don't need dictation or hands-for use in general, but who might benefit from a little bit of extra help so they don't have to type all day, it could definitely be useful. I will say that Chrome has stopped being a browser that I flat out say "its accessibility is too bad to even suggest it to people." They have fixed a lot of its accessibility bugs recently.

Deborah Kaplan