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Re: Google Docs Voice Type

for

From: L Snider
Date: Mar 4, 2016 7:04AM

Hi Deborah,

That was awesome, thanks so much!

Glad to hear about Chrome as well. What is weird is that I find way more
accessibility add ons for Chrome versus Firefox now. I found that odd, as
it used to be the reverse.

Cheers

Lisa

On Thu, Mar 3, 2016 at 9:46 AM, < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> 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
>
>