Review of Vista Speech Recognition september 2009

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Being I knew nothing at all about the free speech-
recognition app built into Vista, who was better
qualified to write a review about it.

Free built-in app is called WSR, short for
Windows Speech Recognition.

Took me two weeks to learn. Below is the result
of some recent dictation of mine, between
the lines of asterisks:

(do yourself a favor, skip down to
the review itself, immediately after
this complex 200 word dictation example)

*************************************
Maximizing therapeutic gain with gemcitabine and
fractionated radiation.

Mason KA, Milas L, Hunter NR, Elshaikh M, Buchmiller L,
Kishi K, Hittelman K, Ang KK.

Department of Experimental Radiation Oncology, The
University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston,
USA.

mason@notes.mdacc.tmc.edu

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVE: The nucleoside analogue gemcitabine
inhibits cellular repair and repopulation, induces
apoptosis, causes tumor growth delay, and enhances
radiation-induced growth delay. After single doses of drug
and radiation, maximum enhancement of tumor response was
obtained when gemcitabine preceded radiation by at least
24 h. Conversely, the cellular radioresponse of the normal
gastrointestinal epithelium was slightly protected when
gemcitabine and radiation were separated by 24 h. This
differential response created a time frame within which
therapeutic gain could be maximized. In our present
investigation, we sought to define the most
therapeutically beneficial scheme of gemcitabine
administration when combined with fractionated
radiotherapy.
.... All 3 schedules of drug administration produced
therapeutic gain; however, when gemcitabine was given more
than once in a 5-fraction radiation treatment schedule,
normal tissue toxicity increased. The highest therapeutic
gain (1.4) was achieved by giving a single dose of
gemcitabine (25 mg/kg) 24 h before the start of
fractionated radiotherapy.

*********************************************
End of sample dictation example -





(above text has been "corrected", you are
looking at a version with no mistakes)

There _were_ 6 mistakes.

Dragon would likely have made only 2 mistakes,
but Dragon Medical costs $1,600 !!!


Took me 4 minutes to speak the above 200 "words"
at the slow rate of 50wpm, which is admittedly
slow, but the WSR app made too many mistakes
when I tried to speak faster.

Why? Because WSR was never designed to handle such
complex medical jargon, it was designed for
ordinary speech, no big deal.

There were 6 mistakes which means an accuracy rate
of 97% - - - not as good as Dragon, (99%)
but not too shabby for a free speech app.


The 6 mistakes
-------------
"Houston" was: "used an"
"analog" was: "analogs"
"after single doses" was: "after a single doses"
"sought" was: "shot"
"... All" was: "... All"
(space after ellipses was too long)

"treatment" was: "treatments"




WSR is very close in performance to the Mac
"MacSpeech Dictate 1.5.2" - - - hard to say
which one is the better speech app.

Difference is, we Windows users get our
speech app for free, while Mac users
have to pay $200 for theirs. hee hee

Mark-