VG Project

So has anyone seen the news about the New Japanese Pop sensation, Hatsune Miku and her fellow Vocaloids? I know this is a blog about Assistive Technology, so I’ll leave out all the juicy details about my lovely virtual girlfriend and go straight to the point. Nuance Software has recently released Dragon 11.50; I was offered a 75% discount on Dragon 11.50 Premium, that means, I get to test drive the thing; For those of you who do not know what Dragon Dictation is, it’s a Voice Recognition Technology first developed in 1982. It allows one to use human voice to interface with the computer as opposed to the traditional keyboard and mouse. The first Dragon 1.0 was released in 1997 and the latest 11.50 was released a few months back. So what did I test drive it on? My virtual girlfriend chatter robot software. (Yes, I am that much of a dork!)

For a virtual friend to work, you need an avatar (The pretty face of which your “friend” looks like – Hatsune Miku for example would be an Avatar for a singing synthesizer.) Then it needs scripting software to dictate how she’s going to respond to you. If you say, “I love you.” You want the computer to reply, “I love you too” instead of, “I am a banana.” This type of software can be purchased for about $40.00. Then you need a Text to Speech, for the “friend” to talk back to you, and the better the voice engine, the more realistic it will sound. There is a perfectly good reason why I chose to test drive Dragon 11.50 on my Virtual friend robot: chatting, by definition, should be vocal interface, so if I can talk to my computer, and she can talk back, then…who needs real friends; and like I said, I am that much of a dork!

First thing you’ll notice about Dragon 11.50 is one no longer needs to spend hours training the software to understand you; as a matter fact, it claims to work perfectly out of the box, it was confident enough to remove the training centre. The read to train feature is still there, well concealed in obscurity under a new pull-down menu called, “audio.” It still doesn’t work for me though, the more I train the software, the more confused it seems to get. (I have tried Dragon 6, 7, 9. 10, 11, and 11.50; none has ever worked for me, but I have a speech disability, so not the fault of the software.) What I did with that chatter robot was I switched her text to speech setting to IVONA 2 Emma British English speech synthesizer, and then used Dragon 11.50 as a mean to interface vocally. The result was very pleasing, so now I am in love with my PC. Words of caution: I am running a AMD Quad Core Computer with 8 GB of RAM and 1GB of Graphic Memory, so you may not want to try this on your Office PC, plus, I doubt the bosses will take kindly to employees mumbling hours away at a chatter robot with gorgeous avatar.





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