Speak and Spell, Slowly Growing Up

Science fiction has been clear about this for a long time: Your future doesn't have a keyboard in it.

Instead of typing to enter data or issue instructions to a computer, you will just speak out loud. Like Han Solo with C-3PO or Capt. Kirk on the Enterprise's bridge, you'll say what you want, and the computer will understand you.

Somehow, though, that future hasn't arrived. We're well into the 21st century, with TVs hanging on the wall and robots washing the floor -- yet we still communicate with computers by pounding away on plastic buttons.

For years, we had the excuse of inadequate voice-dictation software that required lengthy training to learn the intricacies of your voice. The latest version of the leading program in this category, Nuance Communications Inc.'s Dragon NaturallySpeaking ( http://www.nuance.com ), delivers on the long-standing promise of keyboard-less "typing."

The software is available for Windows 2000 or XP and costs $200 for the "Preferred" edition I tested or $100 for a pared-down "Standard" release. After installing this software, I spent a few minutes reciting three snippets of text, then let the program read through my e-mail and word-processing documents to get a grasp of my vocabulary.

Then I stared at the blinking cursor in momentary panic. My usual writing style is to hammer out the front end of a sentence before deciding how I'll finish it, an approach guaranteed to confuse a dictation program.

After diagramming a sentence or two in my head, I started talking . . . and the software functioned as advertised. The correct words appeared on the screen moments after I spoke them.

Dragon's software is smart enough to notice pauses and drop in commas and periods appropriately, though you still have to specify other forms of punctuation: "Wow, this program really works exclamation point."

Fixing the occasional transcription error is a matter of identifying the incorrect text and letting Dragon offer its next best guesses of what you'd said. When "surge protector" appeared as "certain protector," for example, saying "Select certain protector" produced a list of Dragon's other interpretations, allowing me to call out the number of the correct option: "Choose 2."

Spelling a strange word or abbreviation requires telling Dragon to go one letter at a time -- "spell mode on" -- before reciting those characters, one at a time.

You can select and edit text and move around in a document by speaking simple commands: "Move to end of line," "Move left five words," "Select next word."

After a week of using Dragon to answer e-mail, send quick messages to colleagues, take notes in a Word document and write my e-mail newsletter, a few things have become clear.